Working with a Lab

Abstract

Chris and Fred discuss how you go about finding a lab to help you come up with some meaningful reliability information. Does that laboratory exist?

Key Points

Join Chris and Fred try to answer a question a listener asked about finding a laboratory to help them work out how long their product will age? … or last?

Topics include:

Can you hand this problem over to a lab to work this out for you? NO. Why? Because to accelerate ageing and life, you need to focus on a small number (typically one) failure mechanism. If this failure mechanism has nothing to do with the dominant way your system fails … then you won’t get any meaningful numbers. You might still get a number … it might be misleading.
Surely there are some laboratories that can do this though? Technically yes. But these laboratories are the more ‘university’ level laboratories that might take several years to be able to fully understand the way your system might fail. But you know who already has a lot of information on this? You and your design team! After all, how can any laboratory know what environment your system will be used in.
So we can’t get outside lab help for testing? OF COURSE YOU CAN! It’s just that you need to have a conversation with them. You need to come with an idea of what sort of failure modes are going to ‘keep you up at night.’ The ‘vital few’ weak points of your system that will be the parts that drive the failure of your system. As long as you don’t outsource critical thinking. Many labs are really good at the testing bit. You need to be good at the understanding bit.

Enjoy an episode of Speaking of Reliability. Where you can join friends as they discuss reliability topics. Join us as we discuss topics ranging from design for reliability techniques to field data analysis approaches.