Environmental simulation is a critical part of the armory of product designers and manufacturers, ensuring that end-uses are viable in a whole host of complex and niche situations. In mature industries, a focus of environmental simulation testing is on pushing products and materials to ever greater resilience by upgrading and expanding measurement for more extreme ranges, increasing the resilience of products. Conversely, the development of new products, or the use of existing products in new environments, requires more complex solutions to questions in design and manufacture. As the popular consumer handheld devices become more prevalent, this technology becomes far more desirable for industrial applications, for example in aerospace or military usage.
Naturally, those products require a return to first principles: does the original design of this product preclude its use in certain environments, simply due to limitations inherent in the design of the product? All of these pressures underline the dynamism of the market demands for environmental simulation, as well as highlighting the importance of holistic approaches to testing, validation and certification.