Life Cycle Testing Services
Your product will go through a lot of wear and tear during its life cycle. What you don’t want is for it to repeatedly break down before its time. After all, if you are guaranteeing your customer that the product will last them a certain period of time, it pays to know that it really will!
DTB’s Life Cycle Testing Services not only enable you to project or establish your product’s longevity before failure, but also help improve it by identifying the weak points in the product’s design, thereby focusing your improvement efforts only on the areas that need them.
Please click on the links below to learn more details about the variety of Life Cycle Testing Services that we offer:
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Life Cycle Testing Services
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Accelerated Life Cycle Testing
DTB has the facilities, expertise and experience to conduct
accelerated life cycle testing on a wide variety
of products. This type of testing is conducted using aggressive test condition profiles
and potential rates of change. Conditions that can be varied include vibration levels,
temperature, humidity, structural load, altitude,
electrical loading and engine
loading.
DTB can work with your engineers
to develop custom load profiles for
this type of testing. Examples of products tested at DTB in this
manner include plumbing fixtures, diesel engines, aircraft arresting
gear, and electrical components. For all these tests, field measurements of the
actual product environment were used to
develop aggressive test parameters that
quickly exercised the
product, in a realistic manner.
Depending on the type of product and test, DTB facilities can handle large test
items and high test levels. From 400,000 lb proof loads to the vacuum of space our
facilities can handle extreme test requirements.
Life Cycle Testing with Environmental Exposure
AT DTB, environmental exposure testing has been conducted on many types of products,
both commercial and military. Even for large systems DTB can develop appropriate
regimes of realistically challenging environments to add to life cycle tests. Salt
fog, SO2 (acid rain) exposure, dust, sand or ground metallic dust are all examples
of contaminants that we have used to provide aggressive environments for testing.
On large components this testing can be broken out by testing smaller coupons with
the results applied to the larger system through the use of “knockdown factors”.
This can reduce testing time and expense by allowing large components to be
tested under laboratory conditions while maintaining confidence of system performance,
overall, under specific adverse environments.
HALT / HASS Testing
HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Testing) testing is designed to improve product
design by identifying the weak points in a design thereby focusing improvements
on only the areas that need them. HALT testing is designed to fail test samples
through aggressive test conditions and profiles. Post test failure analysis is utilized
to identify the failure location and failure mode and provide information to improve
the product’s design or manufacturing techniques. A few iterations of HALT testing
can vastly increase a products durability by identifying areas that need improvement.
HASS (Highly Accelerated Stress Screening) testing is designed to only fail production
units that have incipient flaws that would cause “infant mortality” failures in
the field. The production units are tested using combined environments, at lower
levels and/or durations compared to those used for HALT testing. These tests can be done on a
lot sampling basis or for the entire production run. DTB engineers can work with
you to develop customized test conditions and testing profiles to challenge your
product for all modes of failure. Our facilities can handle large items for this
type of testing. Examples of HALT / HASS testing conducted at DTB include electrical components,
plumbing fixtures, diesel engines and aircraft arresting gear.