What are Zinc Whiskers?
Zinc whiskers are tiny conductive filaments of zinc which grow from metal surfaces that have been electroplated (galvanized) with zinc for corrosion protection. Typically they’re less than a few millimeters (mm) long and only a few thousandths of a millimeter in diameter.
Source: Grow from electroplated metal surface under stress.
Growth Rate: About 1mm per year.
Conductive: Yes
What Could Zinc Whiskers Induce?
Zinc whiskers can find their way inside equipment cabinets and attach to the circuit board, which is easy to cause data loss, hardware failure, electrical fire and system outage.
Below illustration will help you know how zinc whiskers induce failures of your equipment.
The average cost of a data center outage has reached to $740,357 in 2016, maximum downtime costs for 2016 are $2,409,991 (Data from 2016 Cost of Data Center Outages issued by Emerson Network Power). Downtime caused by zinc whiskers raises concern more and more.