A variety of Environmental Chambers also called climatic chambers or climate chambers, that simulate environmental conditions in extreme cold and hot temperatures combined with humidity, corrosion, altitude or vibration and other climatic conditions such as rain, wind, dust and sun to test specimens on biological items, industrial products, materials, and electronic devices and components.
Labtech Climate Chamber are available in various options of sizes, temperature & humidity range, and configurations.
Environmental testing is used to simulate outdoor and/or indoor conditions, such as extremely high and low temperatures for a product or a material. Heat, cold, humidity, and other variables can be used to stress your product. In today’s environment of fast product development and product liability, climate and environmental simulation testing are necessary to ensure your product’s performance.
There are many reasons for your company to proceed with an environmental simulation test. It will often give you an edge between success and failure. For example, if you launch a new product, how can you ensure you will not get tangled up in a web of warranty issues. Environmental & climatic tests can help determine your product’s reliability and how it will perform in the field.
Environmental stresses are often applied to the products being studied one at a time. However, most products need to be tested against more than one environmental stress so that an accurate assessment of their predictable field performance can be assessed.
The most common environmental simulations we usually expose products and materials to include:
When doing environmental simulation testing it is important to have a good understanding of the product characteristics, the normal use conditions, what constitutes a foreseeable abuse and what is the product’s life expectancy. Most of these tests are done on an accelerated basis as many products have a life expectancy that spans over a few years, sometimes more. There is, however, a limit to the stress levels we can expose the products to without starting to cause failure mechanisms that would not naturally occur in typical field applications. For this reason, it is important to have an environmental test plan that takes your product characteristics and applications into account.
All Temperature and Humidity Typical Cycle Graph
In many cases, once the climatic and environmental simulation testing process is completed, physical and mechanical measurements need to be made on the samples to assess whether or not their properties were impacted.
Micom offers a whole host of mechanical, physical and physico-chemical tests. Our material testing lab is ISO 17025 (A2LA) accredited allowing performing testing in industry standards.
For more post-test evaluation test methods, we invite you to read more about material testing and ASTM testing.
If you have any questions about environmental testing or other material testing services, we invite you to contact us today. Our material testing experts will be happy to recommend proper testing conditions, addressing your specific concerns and custom testing needs.
HMW's Corrosion testing laboratory offers numerous corrosion and material degradation testing services. Corrosion testing is often performed using ASTM B117 test.
Corrosion testing has a positive effect on the development, design and lifespan of numerous products. For industries such as aerospace, transportation, and medical devices, this type of testing is vital to ensure the proper development and durability of the product, as it will reduce the risk of corrosion.
Corrosion is the gradual destruction of materials (usually metals), by chemical reaction with their environment. Corrosion degrades the useful properties of materials and structures, including strength, appearance and permeability to liquids and gases.
Worldwide, those damages cost up to 2.5 trillion US dollars which is equivalent to 3.4% of the global GDP in 2013. Every year, the United States alone loses 451 billion dollars on corrosion repairs which represents 11% of the country’s total budget and 2% of its GDP. In Canada, 5.2% of its country’s GDP is lost to corrosion every year. On the industrial level, rust found on metal, for example, can create health and safety concerns or lead to equipment failure and delays in production.
There are many types of corrosion that can occur on materials as highlighted by the non-exhaustive list shown below which can induce damage to various parts of a structure or material.
There are many types of tests for corrosion depending on the variables and environment your material will be subjected to in real life as listed below.
One of the most popular standardized test methods is the ASTM B117 Salt Spray test, as it provides good repeatability without being too expensive. It is used to assess the corrosion resistance of coated or otherwise surface-treated samples. ASTM B117 is not a good time predictor in terms of accelerated aging/predictability as it provides static conditions.
Cyclic corrosion test methods are intended to be more realistic for assessing material corrosion resistance than traditional steady-state exposure tests. Since real-world atmospheric exposures typically include wet and dry conditions, laboratory cyclic corrosion tests can be used to reproduce these natural cyclic conditions in an accelerated manner.
Neutral salt spray testing ASTM B117 is arguably the best-known and still the most used corrosion test in the world. Numerous test methods, like MIL-STD, SAE or even ASTM method,s still refer to ASTM B117 for corrosion testing even if more specific and advanced test methods are now available. The main reason remains that so many companies around the world have so much data on the behavior of their products and materials based on ASTM B117.
ASTM G85 can be seen as an improved version of ASTM B117 to some extent. The standard uses the basic principles of ASTM B117 but adds the specificities of certain industry sectors in order to address their particularities.
ASTM D5894 integrates more natural factors than traditional corrosion tests like ASTM B117 or ASTM G85. By integrating the effects of UV, temperature, and humidity variations, ASTM D5894 improves the correlation with natural corrosion observed in the field.
For additional test methods related to Salt Spray Testing, we invite you to visit the following pages: ASTM B117, Cyclic Corrosion Testing, Coating Testing, and Accelerated Aging Testing.
If you have any questions about corrosion testing, we invite you to contact us today. It will be our pleasure to answer your material testing questions and custom testing requirements.