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14 Understanding the Engineering Challenges Power surges interfere with electronic equipment and components in several ways: • Operational disruption. Industrial equipment and devices of all kinds are managed by controllers that depend on processors that use precise signaling to perform control functions. Power surges can create false signals or disrupt clock cycles in ways that many times interrupt normal control functions and can even cause software crashes in the controller. In industrial operations, reliability is everything. Failed control systems result in costly downtime and can create extremely dangerous conditions. • Equipment degradation. Repeated exposure to low-level voltage surges degrades electronic components. For example, excessive heating of traces on circuit boards may cause microcracks in the boards. These tiny cracks grow over time. This kind of damage usually does not cause the component to fail immediately, but normal use of the component typically aggravates the damage, and additional power surges accelerate the degradation. These damaged components often exhibit unusual behavior that is difficult to troubleshoot or diagnose. Eventually, the component fails and must be replaced long before its expected end of life. • Total destruction. High-voltage surges create heat that melts insulation between conductors, destroys PCBs, and burns out ICs. This damage is usually obvious and instantaneous and always requires replacement of the damaged components or boards. The preferred method of protecting equipment and components against power surges is to block excess voltage. That requires applying surge suppression at a point in a circuit that protects all downstream devices and equipment, such as including overall building surge suppression, incorporating surge suppression into the devices and equipment themselves, or both. Engineers tasked with designing a surge-protection solution face several technology choices. The first step in making the right surge suppression choice is to develop a good understanding of surge-suppression technologies. "Transient power surges can affect the internal insulation of electrical machines and cause them to degrade long before their original lifespans. This is termed as 'chronic degradation.'" Nida Qamar, Project and Design Engineer, Eaton