As promised, I’ve started a campaign of endurance tests on a few DT-supplied glass implant samples. I’ll be subjecting them to deep temperature cycles and repeated acceleration tests over the next few months, and I’ll be reporting how many cycles they endure before dying (if they die) in this here thread.
Here are a few videos of the test setups:
Crush test
Let’s get this one out of the way, because it was over very quickly
Yeah… no.
Drop test
3 implants are taped to the aluminum carrier of our drop tester. I’ve dropped them 5 times to make sure they weren’t going to die rightaway, but I didn’t expect them to. They’ll stay there and ride the drop tester along with our products:
Temperature cycling test
3 batches of 3 implants are taped to the inside wall of 3 of our temperature chambers. They will cycle between -35C and +65C alongside our products:
I will check on them regularly and take note of how many drops or temperature cycles they’ll have undergone.
Those tests mainly stress the internal solder points, and possibly also the dies. The idea is, if the implants survive them for any length of time, they will surely survive the much cozier and cushier environment inside one’s hand forever.
I’d be very interested in shock/over pressure resistance. I’m around explosives regularly and kinda ( not really ) wonder about overpressure damaging a capsule
What you heard was quiet chuckle as I was approaching my reader to check out the implants, and I realized they weren’t just crushed but utterly pulverized into two small white patches of glass powder, and there probably wasn’t much point trying to get a read out of em.
Isn’t blast lung or blast Bowels, like one of the very first things to happen in overpressure situations?
Like before most material damage?
I would imagine you’d be dead a dozen times over before there was enough pressure to crack a capsule outside your body, let alone inside a nice squishy absorbing meet bag full of millions of delicate air sacks
Could be wrong, as always
Maybe glass handles the shock far worse than I imagine, but the capsule is still fairly small so pressure should have a harder time due to surface area and spherical strength?
But again, being wrong is my only sure bet in life
I suppose there is a possibility that a detonation from a high brisance explosive could generate a shockwave capable of shattering a glass implant without damaging the squishy meat around it. I’ve seen a rifle barrel shatter when firing a round with the wrong amount of propellant, with the shooter’s hand right underneath holding the handguard, completely unscathed.
Kind of OT, but you know what’s interesting? The round that exploded the barrel was loaded with 30% LESS powder than it should have been (it was a .700 Nitro). An internal ballistics expert where I worked back then told me that, while less propellant generates less pressure, in certain unfortunate circumstances, it generates a brisant shockware that’s quite powerful enough to blow up a barrel.
It has something to do with detonation, yes. The layman’s explanation I was given was that the powder has too much empty space to expand freely before encountering the back of the projectile and that creates a shockwave. Or something to that effect. I’m really not an internal ballistics specialist - only external.
Yea that’s what I was thinking, I know various powders are specifically designed to take up different amounts of volume per boom unit to help prevent this
There are very few ammo combinations I would ever be willing to deal with the hassle and risk of loading it myself, lest it go boom, as discussed I know enough to know the various ways I COULD fuck up, which is more then enough
However, one would require a very very fluffy powder to prevent detonation,
6.5cm loaded to a sub sonic, could be a lot of fun with some of the new crazy efficient bullets,
And a can of course
Think the numbers I was looking at was maybe 500 yards out of it?
Well, in the case of the failure I witnessed, it was a proof load. Kinda hard to do without loading it yourself. The guy should have overloaded the round by 30%, but they got the math wrong and underloaded it instead. It’s so easy to hit that minus button on the calculator instead of plus
Temp chamber #3: 6 x +65C cycles, 6 x -35C cycles:
2351835163 - OK
2351835142 - OK
2351835194 - OK
The temperature chambers haven’t been used all that much for the past two weeks, because we’re in the build phase of our production process - i.e. we build entire batches of devices that will be tested all at the same time later.
Interesting, that’s a lot more drops than I expected, glad they are still going strong
(Any degradation of the glass housing?)
(Any idea what what g load they get each drop?)
Soo school us on temperature damage
I understand just enough to be dangerous
Does most damage result from expansion/contraction and different thermal expansion rates of dissimilar materials?
Or is there some other cause also?
What generally matters more, the total depth of the cold, or how violently you get there?
No damage that I can see. The implants are under a layer of clear tape though: they might well be cracked and held together by the tape, I wouldn’t know. I doubt it though. I’ll untape them at some point and take a look.
About 1,200G with one of our devices on the carrier. But it’s not the acceleration that matters, it’s the mass of the object. Implants are far too light to sustain major damage from that.
Pretty much. crimped connections work themselves loose, and solder cracks. That’s the reason why manufacturers of products that are subjected to high intensity shocks, vibrations or extreme temperatures can apply for a variance to keep using leaded solder, which is normally forbidden now in Europe.
Shocking them repeatedly on the drop tester tries to achieve the same sort of failure.
Themal shocks are the worst. Same reason why you can slowly bent a tree branch quite a lot and also snap it against something hard fast.
We temperature-cycle our products at 10C per minute above 0C, and 1C per minute under 0C (simply because the refrigeration unit can’t keep up with the demand).
Yeah but… (putting my quality assurance guy hat here). It’s like fatigue failure vs stress resistance: low-level thermal cycling can be - and often is - more destructive than a huge thermal shock applied once. Because essentially, thermal cycling is fatigue failure: it’s repeated shrinking/expansion of the material. That’s what I’m testing here. Not the same test.
Mind you, this is all quite academic, considering no implanted chip will ever experience any of what I’m testing Still, like I said, if they survive those tests as well as yours, that’ll be proof enough that they’ll survive anything in-vivo.
I’m suddenly curious (and maybe a smidge concerned) about an x series getting hit but a simunition round (utm or sim) possibly even a paintball, but those have a much greater surface area to disperse their energy
Got a call into my force on force guy, to see if I can get some energy numbers
