Synthetic Life Testing of Automobile Electrical Equipment

The need for synthetic life testing as an aid to early decisions in new product design and development is discussed.

Means of collating vehicle usage and operating regime data and the statistical determination of population parameters from a small number of test vehicles are shown and used as a basis for the formulation of synthetic life test schedules.

Special-purpose and multienvironmental laboratory facilities designed to operate over a range of up-rated test levels are illustrated and the need is shown for obtaining correlation between the results of synthetic life testing and the predictions of service failure patterns obtained by road testing.