Thermal Vacuum testing basics Thermal vacuum chambers provide environments that most realistically simulate the environment in which products and components will be used. For aerospace, the satellite and space vehicle systems, subsystems, and components must pass carefully planned environmental testing to ensure reliability and safety. Thermal vacuum chambers have been used for many years of […]
A temperature chamber is an essential testing mechanism for testing materials, devices, and various components for strength and robustness enabling the product to carry out the desired purposes (see Different Ways to Use Environmental Chambers) here. The chamber can test to exceed environmental conditions. Wikipedia assures, “a robust climate chamber can mimic a relatively wide […]
Environmental chambers are used by many industries to help design the perfect products or confirm safety and compliance for ones that are slated to be mass produced. For almost seven decades now, these chambers have been used to test all types of products from massive aerospace components to every day consumer packaged goods.
Testing and studying new products is key to ensuring their safety, effectiveness and applications. Since it isn’t always possible, safe, or efficient for that matter, to test products in their actual working environments, using these chambers is the best way to recreate its exact working conditions and measure the results.
Many items require thermal environmental testing. Items going through product development, requiring validation for high reliability applications and products exposed to extreme environments among others require specific thermal testing.
Primarily to verify that the product will work properly in the environment (thermal and otherwise) that it is intended to perform. Sometimes, also to discover end-of-life issues for products, maximize performance or to weed out early failures that might result in product failures
Thermal vacuum testing is a critical step in the design and qualification of space and flight components that are operating at high altitudes such as the mission-critical or sub-assembly components. It enables the component to be subject to space and upper atmospheric conditions – simultaneous altitude and temperature extremes.
Have you ever wondered what journey a piece of equipment or machinery took before ending up in space? Or what testing was done before the rocket’s blastoff? Or why a piece of equipment failed prematurely? Well somewhere along the path to it’s final manufacturing, the components and sub-assemblies were developed and designed with the environmental conditions of where it would be operating in mind.
Many times, there are parts of a device to be tested that have different heat capacities and also possible active load heat sources. A single point temperature control algorithm can have trouble effectively dealing with these variables. Additionally, while it may be tempting to say that a temperature setpoint has been achieved when the numbers on the display panel reach the desired value.
Thermal testing testing of products can’t be ignored. Knowing your product stands up to the harshest environments it will be exposed to over the life of the product provides proof of the design and verified quality. With TotalTemp Temperature Chambers and Thermal Platforms you can most effectively run thermal tests for burn-in or design/production verification.
