TRaC is proud to be the first UKAS accredited facility for Highly Accelerated Life Testing. Accreditation is specifically for our QRS - 410T HALT chamber from Screening Systems Incorporated.
Product durability depends on several factors: fundamental design features, the reliability of components that they incorporate, and latent manufacturing defects. The stresses induced under the extreme conditions imposed by Highly Accelerated Life Testing (HALT) will expose the shortcomings of a product in these areas in minutes rather than weeks or months. The time and cost savings impact for product development plans is therefore substantial.
HALT testing is largely a fatigue process. Fatigue acts particularly on points of stress concentration and the strains induced due either to structures flexing, differential temperatures and gradients create stress cycles that progressively damage materials and the joints between them. In addition to fatigue, mechanical wear is accelerated, as are changes in chemical state, with the result of an overall speeding up of the combined damage processes.
Electronics are particularly suited to evaluation by HALT testing as the thermal and mechanical environments employed are typical of those load types occurring in actual service. The same is true of a wide range of automotive and aerospace products that often see similar environments and also combine disparate materials.
TRaC's HALT chamber is a QRS - 410T HALT from Screening Systems Incorporated which uses pneumatic actuators to provide a virtually true random vibration PSD, faithfully transmitted to the product under test via a table design unique to this equipment.
The chamber parameters are as follows:
| No of Axis | Peak Acceleration (g) | Temperature Range (°C) | Peak Ramp Rate (°C/min) |
| 6 |
35 |
-60 to +150 |
30 to 50 |