Without additional information, a statement that a product is MIL-STD-810 certified or a requirement that a product be developed to meet MIL-STD-810 does not provide meaningful information about the environmental resiliency of a product. MIL-STD-810 is a test method standard that defines the environmental test procedures and engineering considerations for the design of a product. The standard provides 29 test methods that cover a wide range of conditions that a product might be exposed to during its use. Common test methods include Temperature (Methods 501.6 and 502.6) and Vibration (Method 514.7). More application specific test methods include Explosive Atmosphere (Method 511.6) and Pyroshock (Method 517.2).
By its own admission, the emphasis of MIL-STD-810 is on “tailoring a materiel item’s environmental design and test limits to the conditions that the specific materiel will experience throughout its service life, and establishing laboratory test methods that replicate the effects of environments on materiel, rather than trying to reproduce the environments themselves.” This means that the intended use of the product needs to be considered when identifying the test methods. It would not be appropriate to design and test a product to pass a Rain test (Method 506.6) when it is intended to be used indoors.
Figure 1: NuWaves in-house environmental test capabilities allow us to quickly and cost-effectively validate the performance of products to common test methods.
In addition to selecting the appropriate test methods for a product, it is equally important to specify suitable test limits within each test method. For example, the limits for Low Pressure (Altitude) (Method 500.6) and Vibration (Method 514.7) are different for a product intended to be installed on an H-60 as opposed to a product intended for an F-22.
If pouring through all 1086 pages of the latest MIL-STD-810 seems daunting, then let NuWaves’ experienced engineers guide you through the process. NuWaves’ full spectrum of Engineering Services are available for a wide array of product development needs.
