Accelerated Aging (AA) Testing

We are your source for Accelerated Aging (AA) reliability testing. Let us help reduce the infant mortality rate of your product, which will increase your customer's satisfaction, overall quality, and eliminate warranty returns.

Accelerated Aging (AA) Explained

Testing has always been an integral part of a products evaluation for the determination of reliability and integrity. But have we done a good job in this endeavor? We have used Environmental Stress Screening (ESS), Highly Accelerated Life Testing (HALT) and Highly Accelerated Stress Screening (HASS), which was performed via robust thermal and/or vibration testing.

Were they effective??? NO!!!!!

Why not? They were not effective because there was no correlation between the products life use environment and the "robust" test environment.

Accelerated Aging (AA) is the ability to correlate the effects of warrantee life and the "engineering stress testing" that can be used at any point during the products life cycle to evaluate the products design, produceability, quality, reliability, warrantee status and more.

All products age as a function of their use environment. Therefore, an accelerated test profile must precipitate the same type of anomalies seen in normal life. When this occurs the accelerated aging profile is validated as being in unity for that application.

What has been lacking in the test arena for many years has been the ability to correlate the integrity relationship between the products normal life of one or two times warrantee (20,000 to 80,000 hours), to that of the qualification accelerated robust integrity of the engineering evaluation/qualification test that is less than 500 hours of environmental exposure. Accelerated aging properly used allows the test engineer to develop robust environmental test profiles that have a 1:1 relationship to the normal use environment at a ratio of 1:100 times or more within the products life cycle.

As a product moves from design concept to mature production, there are many different degrees of evaluation tests that can be developed. By being able to compress 80,000 hours of normal consumer warrantee life into less than 168 hours of accelerated life, the designer is allowed to evaluate the integrity of the design. Now design changes or improvements can be evaluated and the lowest cost design can be incorporated into the product while warrantee risk is taken out of the equation.

Testing at different points in a products life cycle can now be selected to evaluate the integrity or changes that have occurred as a function of changes in processing, part supplier or automation. This allows the cost reduction process to be evaluated without impacting design reliability integrity. The product can now be manufactured at a lower cost, in a shorter time, with higher reliability.

Listed below are six test evaluation profile points at which Accelerated Aging may be applied:

Garwood Laboratories, Inc. can guide you through the development and application of your Accelerated Aging (AA) profile. Call us today for further information.