Patent attributes
Systems and methods for estimating electrical component degradation caused by an operating parameter that stresses the component in a series of stress cycles, in which cycle count values are maintained which individually correspond to a range of values of the operating parameter, and a plurality of maximum cycle values are stored, which individually correspond to one of the ranges and represent the number of stress cycles in the corresponding range at which the component is expected to have a user defined failure probability value. For a given stress cycle, one of the count values is incremented that corresponds to the range that includes a measured or sensed value, and a cumulative degradation value for the electrical system component is computed as a sum of ratios of the individual count values to the corresponding maximum cycle values.