  This paper focuses on accelerated aging methods for magnet wire. Reliability
of electrical devices such as coils, motors, relays, solenoids and transformers
is heavily dependent on the Electrical Insulation System (EIS). Accelerated
aging methods are used to rapidly simulate the conditions in real life, which
is typically years (20,000 hours) depending on the operating conditions. The
purpose of accelerated aging is to bring lifetime of an EIS to hours, days or
weeks. Shortening the lifetime of an EIS to such an extent, allows for the
study of the insulation materials behavior as well as investigate ways to
estimate the remaining useful life (RUL) for the purpose of predictive
maintenance. Unexpected failures in operation processes, where redundancy is
not present, can lead to high economical losses, machine downtime and often
health and safety risks. Conditions, under which thermal aging methods are
generally reported in the literature, typically neglect other factors, owing to
the sheer complexity and interdependence of the multifaceted aging phenomena.
This paper examines some existing thermal aging tests, which are currently used
to obtain data for enamel degradation in order to try to better understand of
how the thermal stresses degrade the EIS. Separation of these stresses, which
the EIS operate under, can yield a better understanding of how each of the
Thermal, the Electrical, the Ambient and the Mechanical (TEAM) stresses behave.
