Investigating the Impact of Covid Pandemic on 12V Battery Failures Through Reliability Modeling

The paper hereby presented intends to share an overview of a series of analyses performed on batteries equipping multiple products. Starting from the "Reliability Modeling of 12V Batteries used in Multiple Products" study (P. Fanelli, C. Sidoti, M. Thomas, "Reliability Modeling of 12V Batteries Used in Multiple Products", IEEE, RAMS 2023), question marks on how the Covid series of events had impacted 12V battery standard operations at early stages of the product life cycle were left unanswered. This uncharted area of the previous study led to a SPIT (Same Point in Time) analysis performed by comparing product operational hours in service and days in service scenarios. Four different time windows have been considered and four different products have been selected for deeper battery performance evaluations under the influence of the Covid pandemic uncontrollable chain of events. While the SPIT based analysis has demonstrated the usefulness of the approach in comparing different time periods by taking an equivalent data slice from each period to provide valid comparisons without waiting for the data to mature, it has also revealed the complexity of the analysis and the inability to explain the results adequately when complicated by exceptional events such as the Covid pandemic.