HYDRA: Injecting Electrical Faults in an Automotive Power Distribution Network

Increasing adoption of Smart Power Switches (SPS) in automobiles means these devices now distribute power to both comfort applications as well as critical equipment like sensors and cameras. Their behavior under adverse conditions, especially electrical faults in the vehicle's power harness, becomes important to be characterized and tested. This paper presents a scalable test system developed for this purpose which is capable of emulating impedance profiles of different parts of the power harness in hardware and introduce faults on demand. The system is a novel tool to investigate fault propagation and the response of the switch's protection features. The results and data generated by the system is used in a co-simulation digital model.