Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
I wonder how many product tests have been undertaken and nothing has been done with the results? Maybe development activities have moved on before any results are available? Maybe the test results didn’t provide the answers that were needed? Maybe the test wasn’t focused on the critical issues. In other words, cost, time and resources were wasted.
I will present a better way to ensure value is delivered and test results are acted upon. [Read more…]
You cannot test in reliability any more than you can test in quality. Often reliability testing is done though, and knowing the range of testing approaches and their associated results will help you get the most information from each test conducted.
Let’s explore the types of testing that generate information useful as you develop a reliable product. There are 4 different types of reliability testing:
Within each type there are many variations to the testing details and the specific results generated. Understanding the questions each type of testing has the capability to resolve is a good first step to implementing the right set of tests for your project. [Read more…]
This type of reliability may have different names. A quick search of a few references in my library and I didn’t find ongoing reliability testing, ORT, in any of them.
It does exist and you may have heard of it before or even use some form of ORT. Or not.
Ongoing reliability testing or ORT is the continued evaluation of your product typically using samples drawn from production. The testing evaluates the reliability performance of recent production units.
The focus is on finding anomalies or changes that may occur in the design, supply chain, or production process that significantly changes field reliability performance. [Read more…]
One aspect of HALT, (a test to find weaknesses and reliability risks empirically), is the difficulty for many engineers that are new to the HALT- that it guarantees that the maximum or recommended operating environmental specifications for the system and components under test will be exceeded, and failures beyond spec are potentially relevant to field reliability. [Read more…]
Highly Accelerated Life Testing (HALT) is a technique to expose weaknesses or faults with a product.
HALT uses individual or combined stresses in a step stress approach to quickly apply sufficient stress to reveal defects.
HALT is not a specific chamber or fixed set of test conditions. It is an exploratory process to reveal weaknesses in a design.
The product development process naturally includes a check step, to determine if the expected functions of the product work as expected.
Some teams then add a measured amount of stress (temperature, vibration, dust, load, etc.) to the product to explore functionality at elevated stress levels. [Read more…]