Introduction to Fixture Design
Electronic and electro-mechanical components can be utilized in many different applications with a wide variety of working conditions in any given product.
A competitive market in for example long haulage services, forces companies to steadily work on increasing the working capacity of their products. This leads to a lot of stress on the different components on the products. As technology keep on progressing the amount of electrical and electro-mechanical components put into products increase in number.
They therefore play an increasingly larger role in assuring the proper functionality of any given products. Evaluating whether a component will be viewed as able to withstand the environment on a certain conditions or not is a cumbersome job. The basis of this dilemma lies in formulating suitable and definable requirements that corresponds well to the components eventual working conditions. As a natural progression it is necessary to find accelerated testing procedures that relate to these set criteria, as it is a practical impossibility to test all components during the whole lifecycle of products.
A few of these accelerated tests concern the vibrations that will occur on all components built into products, and these are something that may act very detrimental on certain components. One of the challenges regarding this type of testing is to make sure that the device under test (DUT) is mounted onto the vibration equipment in a similar way as it would be mounted on while in operation condition. This is done in the pursuit of having the forces from vibration transferred into the DUT in a way that is the most similar to the power transfer from its actual working conditions.
A vibration test fixture is the interface between the device under test and the vibration equipment. However, the test fixture needs to be more stiff and rigid than the corresponding part used for mounting on the vehicle, since vibrations during accelerated testing are much more severe than vibrations during true operation of the component. The way in which a DUT is mounted during a vibration test can make the difference between the component passing or failing a test. The way it is mounted should neither add nor subtract energy from the applied test.
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