Research on Automatic Testing Methods for IPU Power Supplies

As the core power supply unit of the railway communication signal system, the operational stability and performance reliability of the IPU power supply are directly related to railway transportation safety. The railway signal field has extremely stringent requirements for high reliability, high stability, and adaptability to extreme operating conditions of power supply equipment. Addressing the technical bottlenecks of traditional IPU power supply testing, such as complex environmental setup, high manual intervention, time-consuming non-coplanar interface docking (5-8 minutes for single device preparation), incomplete test coverage (lack of voltage/load boundary scenario testing), and poor result consistency, this paper proposes a fully automated testing method for IPU power supplies tailored to railway signal scenarios. This method innovatively adopts a technical architecture of "moving spring probe docking + programmable excitation + multi-dimensional monitoring". Relying on the automatic alignment and elastic fitting characteristics of customized moving spring probes, combined with the bidirectional fixing mechanism of electric cylinders, it achieves high-speed and precise docking of multiple interfaces. Through programmable power supply/load generation of rated and boundary voltage and multi-load combination excitation, coupled with a 16-bit high-precision ADC acquisition circuit, a data acquisition system is constructed. Integrating image recognition technology based on HSV color threshold segmentation, it completes visual monitoring of lamp position status and screen parameters, and integrates a "recognition-recording-retry-alarm" fault adaptive processing mechanism to enhance the stability of the testing process. Experimental verification results show that the testing time for a single IPU power supply is reduced from 15 minutes to 4 minutes, a 60% reduction compared to traditional methods. The fault recognition accuracy rate is over 98%, supporting parallel testing of 10 devices, with a batch testing efficiency increase of 73.3%. It comprehensively covers key performance indicator testing scenarios. This solution effectively eliminates manual operation errors, improves the standardization and traceability of the testing process, and provides efficient and reliable technical support for the quality control of IPU power supply mass production, meeting the stringent application requirements of railway signal equipment.