Environmental Stress Screening

Are you involved in reliability (particularly of electronics)? Are you required to understand and/or perform HALT (highly accelerated life testing), ESS (environmental stress screening) and/or HASS (highly accelerated stress screening)? Let’s commence with post-production ESS.

We consider how hardware (particularly electronic hardware) tends to fail over time. This “bathtub curve” idea is based upon life insurance statistics. Quite a large number of deaths occur very early and very late in human lifetimes. With wide variations, hardware reliability can be viewed similarly. An equipment purchaser or user hopes that all of the “infant mortalities” have already occurred at the factory and that he will receive a long “useful life” period before his new product wears out or is scrapped.

This vibration and shock technology course deals almost exclusively with hardware. The necessary software behaves much differently.


24.1 What is ESS?

24.2 Hardware vs. software reliability

24.3 Military services pioneered ESS

24.4 ESS analogies

24.5 Latent defects precipitated

24.6 Why Is ESS needed?

24.7 Relates how to electronics?

24.8 Overstressing required

24.9 Automotive electronics ESS

24.10 Focus on random vibration

24.11 A final production step

24.12 Not simulation but rather stimulation

24.13 Most effective stimuli

24.14 Random vibration is needed

24.15 Is ESS helping us?

24.16 Does ESS lessen product useful life?

24.17 How do we define useful life?

24.18 Extensions to HASS and to HALT

24.19 Are uniformity and repeatability essential?

24.20 Electronic maintenance monitoring