How does thermal stress screening work?
Subjecting a product to rapid cycles of heating and cooling will cause it to expand and contract. If a device is made up of a number of different materials then their different thermal expansion coefficients will cause them to expand and contract at different rates and by different amounts. This leads to high levels of mechanical stress concentrating at any point of weakness. Robustly designed and well-manufactured products will be able to withstand these stress reversals, however weak product will fail be identified by conventional testing or inspection. This process is particularly effective at finding latent faults caused by poor design, component failure or manufacturing problems in electronic assemblies or devices.
