Articles tagged Highly Accelerated Life Testing (HALT)

An experiment to quickly discover weaknesses in an item’s design or assembly process by applying increasing steps of one or more stress vectors until failures occur.

by Fred Schenkelberg 10 Comments

When to Conduct HALT

HALT (highly accelerated life testing) is a method to reveal product weaknesses. Design prototypes experience the step-stress application of relevant stresses until failures appear.

The intent is to find design or process related weaknesses early in the design process thus providing time to economically address the issue. Using a build-test-fix approach does improve a product’s robustness and reliability.

Being a useful tool, should you conduct HALT on every project? It seems that revealing weaknesses is certainly useful. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 1 Comment

Discovery Testing

Testing a new design is expensive and takes time to accomplish. During the design, process engineers make assumptions across many decisions. Unknown interactions and unanticipated events may lead to product failure.

Finding design weaknesses early in the design process permits the team to address and correct problems. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

HALT Value

It’s always necessary to estimate the value of specific reliability activities. It is needed to justify the investment required to accomplish the task. Prototypes, diagnostics equipment, and environmental chambers are expensive. The difficulty is an inability to know what will be found, before conducting the experiment.

Not doing the test means the certainty of not finding anything. That is often not enough motivation to invest, to learn something about the reliability performance. The following scenario is just one situation, along with a few ideas to help you estimate the value of investments in reliability work. [Read more…]

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Why HALT is a methodology, not equipment

Kirk Gray, Accelerated Reliability Solutions, L.L.C.

It is easy to understand why the term HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Test) is so tightly couple to the equipment called “HALT chambers” systems. Many do not think they can do HALT processes without a “HALT Chamber”. Many know that Dr. Gregg Hobbs, who coined the term HALT and also HASS (Highly Accelerated Stress Screens), spent much of his life promoting the techniques and was also the founder of two “HALT/HASS” environmental chamber companies. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 11 Comments

ALT and HALT

The other day I got a question about the difference between ALT and HALT. There was some confusion probably because of the similar words in the acronym. ALT is Accelerated Life Test, and HALT is Highly Accelerated Life Test. [Read more…]