What Factors Affect the Lifespan of Connectors

As the public's expectations for the performance of electronic products increase, improving the lifespan of connectors has become a design trend. This is also regarded as the most important indicator of the reliability of connector performance. Additionally, intense market competition requires designers to find suitable materials among cost-effective alloy materials to reduce costs. Due to this situation, the working characteristics of connector copper alloys are very close to their performance limits.

How can the lifespan of electronic connectors be predicted? We can make decisions on existing materials based on stress relaxation data. These data lines have been widely used in the computer, communication, and automotive electronics industries. According to the currently available information, there is a lack of data on the product lifecycle, especially in the computer field. At the same time, it is a more useful data set for shortening the validity period and product development time.

In order to narrow down the selection of contact material, most designers use stress relaxation data. However, many designers are also looking for better testing methods to more accurately predict lifespan, thereby reducing the number of samples required for testing and cutting costs.

High-density connectors for extremely harsh environments and automotive connectors under the hood are mostly designed according to class 3 or class 1 requirements, which require a low initial insertion force, making stress relaxation an important characteristic even at lower temperatures.

However, it is difficult to accurately determine the standard time for testing data in special environments.

Normally, at operating temperatures, a test time between 1000h and 3000h can be used to evaluate the characteristic data of automotive electronic products. However, various pieces of evidence suggest that there is growing interest in characteristic data beyond 3000h, i.e., 3000-5000h (equivalent to a lifespan of 150,000 miles). If the change in slope is not considered in the test data, it may lead to an overestimation of the lifespan of the contact piece, and this overestimation will increase correspondingly over time. The semi-logarithmic graphical representation of data at a specific temperature is currently the most widely used.

The following conclusions were drawn from stress relaxation testing experiments:

(1) Stress relaxation is of utmost importance in connector design.

(2) When stress is used as a related function of test time, a change in slope is often found. Therefore, to capture this characteristic, the test time should be appropriately long.

(3) When the measured data has a certain correlation with temperature, linearly extrapolating the existing data to longer test times is very useful. The limitation is: when the test time exceeds the specified range, a slope transition may occur, and its performance cannot be predicted at other temperatures.

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Copper alloy plates and strips: Copper strips, brass strips, tin phosphorus bronze strips, lead frame copper strips, copper nickel silicon copper strips, etc. Copper alloy rods: Precision lead-free copper rods, precision lead brass rods, precision common brass round wires, precision common brass flat wires, chromium zirconium copper rods, tin bronze rods, tellurium copper, etc.

Advantages of copper alloy strips:

Stress relaxation rate is below 20%, stable and reliable electrical contact, increased plugging and unplugging lifespan.

Surface roughness is below 0.12μm, ensuring good plating performance, effectively improving the efficiency of high-speed stamping molds and use.

Copper alloy rods and wires:

Product tolerance is below 0.015mm, surface consistency, ensuring good plating performance, meeting customer needs for no post-processing.

Copper chips are smaller than 2mm² after turning, improving customer processing efficiency and reducing equipment maintenance costs.