I'm attempting to diagnose some strange electronics behavior. And it seems to be coming down to this question:
What types of components have failure modes that are temperature independent and are self healing over a time period of days?
-- Paul Hovnanian mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com ------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that.
"Paul Hovnanian PITA "
** You are like the bl " Ah - an elephant is just like a snake !!! "Most intermittent faults behave like you describe if viewed over an INSUFFICIENT time scale.
Think about it a bit harder.
.... Phil
s
ent
Well, a common problem that is moderately temperature independent and takes= hours to days to reappear is cracking solder connections. If the unit or P= CB is disturbed, the cracked joint will remake contact and stay good for as= long as it takes for the rubbed connection to form an insulating film at t= he contact point.=20 I am not sure that this is what you asked, though. Do you mean that the uni= t fails, and after a few days it works again? In that case, I would look at= electrolytic capacitors.
Neil S.
The only genuinely "self-healing" components I know of are Mylar capacitors. The dielectric can be pinhole-punctured by line transients, then gradually recover. (There might be other dielectrics with this property.)
more specifically it would be metallized capacitors with no foil in them. A transient will puncture the dielectric and then the metallized layer aound it burns up and there's nothing left to conduct in that area, so the short clears out. It's pretty cool.
You loose a bit of capacitance each time this happens as the surface are of the places decreases each time some burns away, but for most stuff it doesn't really matter.
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