A model-based automotive smart fuse approach considering environmental conditions and insulation aging for higher current load limits and short-term overload operations

This contribution presents a new concept for model-based automotive smart fuses, which takes indirectly into account the influence of real environmental conditions such as neighboring cables and local ambient temperatures. The proposed concept is based on a thermal cable model for the standard cable protection and additionally on the measurements at the cable ends and thus enables a short-time overload operation, which can be particularly important in safety-relevant driving situations. The reduction of lifetime of the cable caused by thermal overload is also monitored and used as an additional tripping criterion.