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Qualification or ‘type approval testing’ is generally regarded as the formal process undertaken to ensure that the equipment fully complies with the requirements and specifications being sought by the customer. Typically these include; EMC, safety and environmental conditions.
Understandably many of the requirement specifications presented to the company relate purely to the system enclosure aspects only. Nonetheless, Elma-Mektron endeavours as far as possible to take a ‘holistic’ view with regards to overall system integrity/suitability given the operational, EMC, environmental and safety requirements mandated. |
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This is vitally important as we recognise that whilst it is imperative for the system enclosure elements supplied by the company (typically these include; mechanical enclosure, card-frame, backplane, power supply, mass storage devices/peripherals and I/O wiring etc.) to meet a customer’s requirement specification, it would, however, prove of little value should at the end of the day a fully hardware configured system fail to do so.
For example, customer supplied or installed active hardware such as VME or CompactPCI boards could suffer physical damage when undergoing shock and vibration testing. Therefore advance knowledge of active hardware fragility factors provide the opportunity to employ suitable mitigation measures within the system enclosure’s design. This could include shock/vibration isolation of system sub-assemblies integral to the enclosure such as card frames and mass storage devices or in some instances the entire system enclosure.
Similarly there is little point in carrying out EMC testing on a system enclosure without active hardware installed, running software and various I/O lines being stimulated in a fashion representative of the target application.
A true partnership with the customer is evidently essential, particularly as it is not unusual for the qualification testing process to identify some areas that need addressing in one way or another. Moreover, considering the final equipment invariably contains customer supplied/recommended active hardware boards and/or modules etc. a number of ‘grey’ areas of responsibility can arise.
Bearing the above mentioned observations in mind it is perhaps not surprising that Elma-Mektron are frequently contracted by our customers to project manage the formal qualification process in addition to supplying the system enclosure.
For this the company works with a number of NAMAS accredited test houses and operates an ‘open-book’ policy with regards to commercial matters in this respect.
Prior to carrying out formal qualification testing the company is able to undertake a high level of in-house pre-compliance/confidence testing as an intrinsic part of its risk management process.
Our in-house pre-compliance/confidence testing capabilities include:
- Conducted and radiated emissions testing
- High/low temperature testing
- Immersion-proof testing
- Moisture ingress
- Acoustic noise
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