Modeling of Contact Arcing for Transient Conducted Immunity Test

Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) compliance to transient conducted immunity (CI) tests is required for automotive electronic/electrical systems. An example is the CI 220 test that employs the transient pulses which are generated by relay contact arcing during switching of an inductive load. To realize compliance with minimum efforts, apposite but simple modeling that enables evaluation at early product design phase is therefore desiable for the EMC engineers to avoid failures in advance. In this paper, as an extension of our previous work, an improved circuit modeling method is developed to fully encompass all the operating modes specified in the CI 220 test by combining of the simulation of both contact arcing phenomenon and stochastic contacts opening and closing process. Experimental validation of the developed model using a non-linear load is also demonstrated. The proposed method is featured by its easy-to-implement without requiring numbers of information on arc dynamic physics.