Useful life expectancy

[mpparent]

Does anyone know of an IEEE standard that describes the "Useful Life Expectancy" of electrical equipment, eg. panelboards, switchboards, circuit breakers, motor control centers, transformers, etc.???
If a standard doesn't exist, can anyone point me to studies that may have been completed and published?

Thanks in advance,...

 

[electricpete]

The IEEE Gold Book covers electrical equipment reliability.

"End of Life" is an economic decision that you make taking into account equipment reliability (as function of age), maintenance cost (as function of age), and replacement equipment cost.

 

[akm]

When you give examples of panelboards, switchboards, circuit breakers, motor control centers, transformers, I assume you are mostly worried about the insulation health, and of course the ageing of metal parts due to making and breaking also.
To address the first and important part(Insulation), You may refer IEEE 43-1974, at clause 4.5.2, which gives a fair idea about diagnostic procedure.
Regarding the metal moving parts life expectancy, we may have to depend upon the type tests results(quality cponformance tests reports ), carried out by each manufacturer for each design.Hard to believe, we can rely on independent testing house interpretaion, and so on.
Hope I understood your question to some extent.

 

[mpparent]

I guess I was looking for something a little more concrete. For instance, ASHRAE has life cycle information for mechanical equipment, assuming normal useage. Being a EE, I've really never seen any studies for electrical equipment.

 

[BJC]

Here's a link that is interesting and may be helpful.

http://www.ise.nus.edu.sg/proceedings/apors2000/fullpapers/17-01-fp.htm

Thsi one is b

http://www.siemenstd.com/prods/mv/techtopics/TechTopics15Rev0.pdfy

by Siemens and called Life Expectancy of electrical equipment.

Try searching google for "Electrical Equipment" and MTBF "mean time between failure". There are milspecs for these and suppliers have them for goverment contracts. NASA also compiled a lot data on this subject. I got a few hits under "bathtub curves"

Search Google under "electrical equipment life expectancy" you will get lots of hits. I use to do this more when I was in the nuclear business and thats when I found the NASA data on failure rates and life expectancy. Now most of the projects I work on lives of less that 10 years and get reworked in 3 or so.