Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Chris and Fred discuss a ‘common slope assumption’ … which is something that only those of you with reliability engineering experience will have heard about. This is all about what we called ‘accelerated life testing’ where we increase stresses to accelerate failure. And software that is used to model accelerated life testing. Keen to learn more? Listen to this podcast!
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OK … that is a little macabre. But reliability engineers need to ask themselves this question a lot. And they are a lot of wrong answers out there. Some textbooks say that it is ‘commonly accepted’ to use this thing called the exponential distribution. Other textbooks say that if the ‘Weibull shape parameter is 6 or greater … redesign!’ Do you have any idea what this means? If not, this webinar will be a nice little introduction for you!
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Kirk and Fred discussing two questions from a listener on HALT and ALT.
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Chris and Fred talk about accelerated life testing or ALT. Well before we start, we need to work out what the decision we are informing is. Want to learn more? Listen to this podcast.
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Chris and Adam discussing HALT and ALT. What are these? HALT stands for Highly Accelerated Life Testing. ALT stands for Accelerated Life Testing. They sound very similar. But they are not. HALT is a destructive test regime. In fact, a good HALT plan will involve that product failing many times. This is done by subjecting the product to stresses (vibration, thermal cycling et cetera) well beyond actual operating stresses. Some of the failures this creates will not be relevant. That is, they will simply never occur when the product is used ‘normally.’ But many failures are relevant. And by undertaking HALT, we now have a good idea of which failure mechanisms and modes are likely to occur when it is used normally. And this information is incredibly valuable to a design team. ALT on the other hand starts with a failure mechanism you know about. And in a short period of time, you can predict how long that failure mechanism will cause your product to fail when used normally.
Still confused? Well listen to this podcast.
Andre and Fred discussing some of the ways an ALT can lead you astray, quickly.
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Accelerated Life Testing, ALT, is a technique to estimate the time to failure pattern for an item. In short ALT allows us to shorten time. Done well it provides valuable insights into the future. Done poorly, it is a colossal waste of resources.
In this webinar, let’s talk about the various methods available to you for ALT. How to select the right approach given your specific understanding of the failure mechanism involved. And discuss best and a few worst practices when planning and conducing ALT. [Read more…]
We cheat time. As reliability engineers, we are asked to peer into the future and predict the time to failure for our products and systems.
So, how do you go about setting up an accelerated life test? There are options that work, and some that do not.
Adam and Fred discuss the criticality of selecting the correct ALT for the product to be tested.
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Adam and Fred discuss the fundamentals of Accelerated Life Testing (ALT)
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Adam and Fred discuss the challenges of designing and ALT within the schedule of a product development program.
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There are many reasons to use accelerated testing and just as many ways to conduct the testing.
Matching and balancing cost, risk, and results takes some skill.
Let’s talk about the key elements to consider so you select the best approach for your test.
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