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The accumulated damage that a product experiences in the field due to the variety of vibration stresses placed upon it will eventually cause failures in the product. The failure modes resulting from these dynamic stresses can be replicated in the laboratory and correlated to end use environment to validate target reliability requirements. This presentation addresses three fundamental questions about developing accelerated random vibration stress tests.

Random vibration control systems produce a PSD plot by averaging FFTs. Modern controllers can set the degrees of freedom (DOF), which is a measure of the amount of averaging to use to estimate the PSD. The PSD is a way to present a random signal-which by nature “bounces” about the mean, at times making high excursions from the mean-in a format that makes it easy to determine the validity of a test. This process takes time as many frames of data are collected in order to generate the PSD estimate and a test can appear to be out of tolerance until the controller has enough data to estimate the PSD with a sufficient level of confidence. Something is awry with a PSD estimate that achieves total in-tolerance immediately after the test begins or immediately after a change in level, and this can hide dangerous over or under test conditions within specific frequency bands, and should be avoided.