durability

After 25 years in the reliability field I am still a bit mystified by the humidity testing. Generally the environmental tests can be divided into two major categories: Durability tests, where some form of wear-out mechanism causes products to fail. The most common examples of durability tests are vibration and thermal cycling. The second group is the capability tests, often referred as overstress tests with the goal of determining how well the product can resist certain conditions such as high voltage, accidental drop, dust, or others. It appears that humidity tests belong somewhere in between the two categories. On one hand there are electro-migration, corrosion, dendritic growth, and other failure mechanisms following the pattern of wear-out processes. Those failure mechanisms are …

I was recently contacted by one of my validation engineers in Asia, who asked me to help him understand the reliability requirements, submitted by one of the Asian automotive OEM for a passenger compartment electronic module. The requirement specified a B1 life as the warranty period for the module (3 yrs) and also specified the durability target of 500,000 km. The engineer was confused on how to reconcile the requirements of reliability and durability. In my opinion here we see an example of lack of reliability understanding on the customer’s part, although this was not the first time I came across the product validation requirements listing durability. The problem is that there is no clear technical definition of durability. Sometimes it is associated with the failure-free period, …

Reliability Lab Testing, Consulting, Training.

In the Twilight Zone of Humidity Testing

Reliability vs. Durability

Contact Us

Empowering companies to create happy customers, with well-engineered products.