Implementation of IEC 61000-4-2 Standard Testing under Tropical Humidity for Recommendation to Amendment of International Standards

Humidity is one of the essential environmental factors that can affect the performance of electronic appliances. The yearly average of relative humidity in tropical countries, such as Indonesia, is higher than in subtropical countries. The data shows that the average relative humidity in 11 major cities in Indonesia from 2016-2017 is above 70%. Some IEC standards set different testing requirements for tropical and non-tropical climate condition. IEC 61000-4-2 as a standard for electrostatic discharge (ESD) immunity test only set a single range of relative humidity, 30% to 60%, as the climatic condition requirement. Although this requirement can be applied in the testing laboratory, however, this does not match with the actual climate condition in Indonesia as a tropical country. This paper investigates the effect of relative humidity in air discharge ESD testing to the performance of DVD-Player as the equipment under test (EUT). The measurement showed that the EUT experienced faster initial performance degradation in higher relative humidity. The finding result is expected to provide input to the ESD standard.