Failure Precursors for Polymer Resettable Fuses

Resettable fuses have been widely used in overcurrent or overtemperature circuit protection designs in computers, automotive circuits, telecommunications equipment, and medical devices. Abnormal behavior of a resettable fuse can damage a circuit. This paper identifies and experimentally assesses the failure precursor parameters of a polymer positive temperature coefficient resettable fuse. It is shown that the degradation of the resettable fuse can be monitored, detected, and predicted based on the monitoring of these precursor parameters.