End-of-Line Production HV Test

End-of-Line Production HV Test

End-of-line test is the last gate before a product ships. For anything that carries high voltage in service, that gate includes a withstand or dielectric strength check: apply a defined voltage across the insulation, hold it for a set time, confirm the leakage stays inside limits, and pass or fail the unit. It is a safety test and a quality test at once, and it has to run on every unit, not a sample.

The defining constraint is throughput. A production line has a takt time, and the high-voltage step has to fit inside it. The supply has to ramp to test voltage, dwell, evaluate, and discharge fast enough that it is not the bottleneck. It also has to do this thousands of times a day without operator intervention, which means it lives entirely under software control inside a larger test sequencer. There is no front-panel knob-turning on a production line.

Safety and traceability sit alongside speed. A unit that flashes over during test has to be caught instantly, the energy removed, and the event recorded, both to protect the operator and the fixture and to feed the quality record. The result for every unit, with its time stamp and the conditions applied, has to be logged so the line can prove what it tested and when. A station that cannot produce that record cannot support an audit.

Two retrofittable options carry the safety and repeatability load. Arc Detection watches for flashover, reports it immediately, and can shut the output off the moment it sees one, which protects the operator and the fixture and flags the failing unit cleanly. Ramp Control applies the test voltage at a defined gradient, from 1 V/s up to ten times nominal per second, so every unit sees the same controlled rise and the test is repeatable across shifts and across stations. The supply's own no-load discharge takes 60 seconds typical and up to 120 seconds depending on the model, which is longer than a production takt, so a station that resets in seconds discharges the device under test through its own switched discharge path and interlocks the fixture on a measured zero rather than on elapsed time.

The supply itself is fully digitally regulated, so the applied test voltage is stable and repeatable: 16-bit setting resolution, line regulation tighter than plus or minus 0.01 percent of nominal, and reproducibility of 0.1 percent of nominal from one unit to the next. The leakage decision is made by the station's current measurement in the return path against the limit the test specification sets; the supply's own current limit, settable from 0.01 percent of nominal upward, caps the current if the product fails. The front panel keeps a time-tagged event log, and configurable code protection locks the recipe so a line operator cannot alter it. The 2U enclosure racks into the test station.

For end-of-line work, specify both options on every station. Arc Detection with output shut-off is the safety and pass/fail mechanism. Ramp Control gives the safe, repeatable voltage sequencing the recipe depends on. Use the reversible variant where the product is tested in both polarities; otherwise a fixed-polarity unit is sufficient and keeps the configuration simple.

Lines testing low-voltage, high-volume products should use the HVX-1500-2000 for its current headroom and fast cycle. Products that demand higher withstand levels move to the HVX-10000-300 or HVX-20000-25, accepting the lower current ceiling. Rack the 2U enclosure into the station and replicate the same configuration across parallel test cells so every gate behaves identically.

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