Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
When first charged with designing, conducting, and analyzing an ALT, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as accelerated life testing. Along with the assigned task was the expectation that I would learn what was necessary to design, conduct, and analyze a suitable ALT. I like those kinds of tasks – one where I must learn to succeed.
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Over the past few months, we’ve received some questions about accelerated life testing. There are bound to be more questions as ALT can be confusing to plan, conduct, or interpret. Let’s get together and address your questions related to ALT.
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Sounds simple … right? We simply test faster! Great! But what does this get us? Many organizations are faced with a dilemma when it comes to testing to MEASURE reliability. If we test an amazing new product in ‘at use’ conditions, it might take many years before it will fail. This is time we simply don’t have when it comes to product development. So, how do we test faster? One of the more obvious answers is to increase the stress. Turn the temperature up. Increase the vibration. Use more voltage. But how do we get this right? How can we know that (for example) one week of accelerated testing is equivalent to 10 years of actual use? This webinar will help introduce you to the idea of Accelerated Life Testing, or ALT, to help you and your organization make reliability testing a reality.
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The more you understand the failure mechanisms, the easier it is to design an accelerated life test (ALT). Yet, we often do not have all the information we would like to draft an ALT. So, what do we do then?
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Carefully considering the acceleration factor (AF) is essential when conducting an accelerated life test. Like warp drives shortening the distance, accelerated life tests (ALT) attempt to shorten time. Think of the warp factor and acceleration factor as being similar, well, sort of.
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We can make a guess, some assumptions, or conduct an experiment. In fact, we use engineering judgment, and prudent assumptions to create our experiments that lead to understanding time to failure information. Accelerated life testing, ALT, is one of the most complex and important types of experiments we conduct. It involves samples, failure mechanisms, stress, measurements, and statistics.
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Accelerated Life Testing, ALT, is a technique to estimate an item’s time to failure-pattern. 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. Select the right approach, given your understanding of the failure mechanism involved. And discuss the best and a few worst practices when planning and conducting ALT.
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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? Some options work and some that do not.
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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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