ALT of autombile air bags and fire sprinklers

[afarber]

Products such as automobile air bags and fire sprinklers may have a dominant mode of failure that they will not work when required after a period of time up to 10 years. The test is destructive the air bag and sprinkler open once in a lifetime.

How may the testing be done in less than six months ? (I do not believe that this example is similar to the the toothpaste example in the ALTA 6 site because there the life time expected is only 24 months and the the test is run up to 12 months.)

[RS Support]

Well, mathematically the method is similar if you are looking at it as a destructive degradation problem. What is dissimilar is how far out you want to extrapolate. The crux of the problem is the determination of an appropriate stimulus that will accelerate the failure mode under consideration fast enough to allow you to extrapolate that far out. Now depending on the product, failure mode etc. a stimulus may or may not have a high enough acceleration factor to accomplish what you are looking for.