Accelerated Life Testing

Application ID: 17361


Fatigue testing of nonlinear materials with creep mechanism is a time-consuming process. In accelerated life testing the experiment time is greatly reduced by subjecting the material to testing conditions in excess of the operating one. In the model an aggressive thermal load cycle is simulated and its effect on the fatigue life of a solder joint is examined.

This example demonstrates how to evaluate fatigue driven by a specific strain or energy quantity and therefore a simple schematic representation of an electronic component is used. Moreover only one cycle is simulated as opposed to several that are required to obtain a steady state cycle when working with nonlinear materials. This simplification is motivated by the fact that the purpose of this model is to show how to evaluate fatigue based on a user defined variable. The required strain and energy variables are defined explicitly via ordinary differential equations and are calculated during the simulation of the thermal load cycle.

This model example illustrates applications of this type that would nominally be built using the following products: