HALT study on smart electricity meter

Smart electricity meters (SEMs) play a very important role in our life, and their reliability has been increasingly emphasized by users, developers and manufacturers. To improve the reliability of SEMs, SEM enterprises have conducted a lots of activities related to reliability design, process control and test, etc. of SEMs; however, affected by many reasons, such as defects caused by raw materials, components and manufacturing process, and relatively extreme operating environment, SEMs are hard to achieve inherent reliability level of the original design. To meet the requirements for the time to market, performance of SEMs are required to be evaluated in the shortest time. The Highly Accelerated Life Test (HALT) has been widely used to obtain more reliability information in a short time by stimulating potential defects of products and shortening test duration, and now has become an important mean to evaluate product reliability. Therefore, HALT is an effective way to evaluate performance of SEMs, and the experimental method has been fully approved, promoted and widely used by SEM manufacturers at home and abroad. However, there is no unified HALT program for SEMs. The paper introduces research status of HALT on SEMs, the significance of HALT to improve the product reliability, terms and definitions related to HALT on SEMs, and provides detailed discussion on the way to carry out HALT experiment, including preparation, specification indexes of experiment parameters, requirements for capacity of experimental equipment, experimental steps and details; it has provided theoretical basis and operation guidance for HALT on SEMs. Finally, we conduct an HALT example according to the test methods to show that the poweron and meter reading item is the weakest part of SEM.