Jugaad Engineering: INEMI Flowers of Sulfur Corrosion Test Chamber

ABSTRACT Jugaad is a Hindi word that refers to a creative, frugal way of achieving a goal promptly with limited resources. The paper describes a jugaad approach that an INEMI (International Electronics Manufacturing Institute) team took to develop a low-cost, easy-to-fabricate, and easy-to-maintain corrosion chamber for testing and qualifying electronic hardware for reliable operation in corrosive environments, especially in developing countries. The flowers of sulfur (FOS) corrosion test chamber, designed by INEMI, costs a couple of thousand US dollars to fabricate, compared to the industry-standard mixed-flowing gas (MFG) corrosion test chamber, which costs in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand US dollars. The INEMI FOS corrosion test chamber has proven its usefulness. It is noteworthy that it can reproduce the surface-sensitive, highly chemically complex phenomenon of creep corrosion on printed circuit boards. The creep-corrosion morphology reproduced in the laboratory in an INEMI FOS corrosion test chamber is similar to that observed in data centers with high levels of gas pollution.