Testing electronics to withstand the heat

Record temperatures and repeated heatwaves across Europe, North America and parts of Asia are placing strain not only on people but also on the technologies we rely on every day. Many consumers have experienced the effects first-hand: smartphones stop charging, screens dim, laptops slow down and batteries drain more quickly. While these are often built-in protective mechanisms rather than defects, ensuring products can withstand extreme heat requires rigorous environmental testing.

Modern electronic devices such as smartphones and laptops pack increasing amounts of computing power into ever-smaller spaces, making heat management one of the key challenges in product design. This is one of the reasons they undergo stringent testing to ensure they work in a range of climates and environmental conditions. This is essential for manufacturers to know if they will perform efficiently wherever they are in the world, including during transport or while stored.

Christian Haack is an expert in environmental testing and environmental simulation of electrical and electronic equipment. He is also Chair of IEC TC 104 for environmental testing standards. He said this testing is done via either simulation of real-world environments or artificial thermal ageing, to determine the range, performance and resilience of products in a huge variety of possible scenarios, including extreme weather events.

In this way we can see the resilience of the various components such as the battery or the plastic.

Thermal ageing, he said, is where a product is put into a system that simulates the natural environment but taken to extremes that are not seen in the real world. These tests can be used to trigger a dedicated wear of components, simulating the ageing process of materials. Here the different thermal elongation probabilities are utilized to simulate a year of usage in significantly shorter times. One can simulate the capacity of an old battery by ageing it artificially in climate test chambers.

Knowing what kinds of tests to undergo is the first most important step for manufacturers and testing laboratories and requires having a deep understanding of all elements of the environmental conditions that the product could be exposed to. If a phone is left on a caf table in full sun during a 40 C heatwave, for example, the relevant environmental stress is not just air temperature but also solar radiation, which can add roughly 30 C of additional heating to a surface under strong sunlight. This is why a phone left in direct sun may become much hotter than the air temperature alone would suggest.

Having this understanding not only helps manufacturers design products to an agreed level of performance but decide what level that will be in terms of return on investment.

We can test, for example, if a product such as a phone or a laptop will age faster when it is exposed to 40-degree temperatures for ten days a year or 100 days a year. Every possible test scenario is possible, enabling manufacturers to choose what level of resistance or durability is appropriate for the market that it is used in.

Knowing what environmental conditions a product may face is one challenge. Knowing how to reproduce those conditions consistently in a laboratory is another.

The IEC 60721 series of standards provides the environmental map, classifying real-world conditions such as temperature, humidity and solar radiation. It provides a common framework for describing, classifying and quantifying the environmental conditions that electrical and electronic products may encounter during transport, storage, installation and use.

The IEC 60068 series then provides the corresponding test methods, enabling manufacturers around the world to subject products to comparable environmental stresses.

IEC 60721-2-4, for example, provides environmental data and severity levels for sunlight exposure. It helps manufacturers understand how much solar radiation products may experience in the real-world during transport, storage and use. IEC 60721-2-1 presents classifications of open-air climates in terms of temperature and humidity. It is intended to be used as part of the background material when selecting appropriate temperature and humidity severities for product testing and application.

The IEC 60721 series is part of the same family of environmental-classification tools used by industries and organizations concerned with operating equipment in demanding environments, including defense applications, said Haack.

These standards are referenced in NATOs environmental engineering framework known as the Allied Environmental Conditions and Test Publications, for example AECTP 300 and 400, and is widely used across industrial, rail, telecom, energy and transportation sectors as a reference environmental-classification system.

When it comes to climate change and extreme weather events, said Haack, these standards become increasingly relevant.

As heatwaves become more frequent and temperatures reach new records, environmental testing is helping manufacturers understand how products will perform under increasingly demanding conditions.

As temperatures continue to rise in many parts of the world, standards such as IEC 60721 and IEC 60068 help manufacturers translate real-world environmental conditions into repeatable laboratory tests. This enables them to evaluate how products will perform not only in todays climate, but also under the more demanding conditions of the future.

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