The Arrhenius Theory of Accelerated Testing

 

Accelerated testing is crucial in the development and quality control of many devices including batteries, integrated circuits, microprocessors, etc.  Anything that has a multi-year shelf-life or life cycle.

Alkaline batteries, for example, are often advertized to have a 10-year shelf-life.  The only way to test such an extreme shelf-life and to verify this claim is through accelerated test methods.  To be sure, real time testing is also done as a final verification, but by the time those results are in, the batteries have long since left the manufacturing plant and are in the hands of customers.  The last thing any manufacturer wants is for customers to find the flaws in their products.  Thus, manufacturers must have test methods that root out flaws and defects long before customers ever see them.

The most often used accelerator in accelerated testing methods is temperature.  By increasing the temperature, degradation reactions are sped up and failure is accelerated.  By testing to failure at multiple temperatures, the time-to-failure can be extrapolated back to room temperature where real-time testing is impractical for quality control or product development activities.

Here is the scientific foundation for elevated temperature accelerated testing.