TYRI Test Lab; unique, practical & efficient

TYRI’s lights must withstand harsh stresses in the toughest environments. To guarantee that the lights perform in environments where they are subjected to impacts, high salt content, moisture, water, dust, and extreme cold or heat, all products are tested in TYRI’s own test lab. Anders Johansson, Head of Quality Testing, takes us on a tour of the lab.

“Many lighting manufacturers send their products away for testing, but TYRI has an in-house laboratory. This enables us to quickly and easily examine new products and make modifications to existing products. When we develop new innovations, it is highly practical to have access to our own lab. It allows us to perform tests at an early stage and determine whether we are investing in the right technology, instead of being surprised by faults and shortcomings far into development. Furthermore, it goes much faster when we produce customised lights with clear requirement specifications for what the lights must be able to cope with,” says Anders.

VIBRATION TESTING

To ensure that the lighting is able to withstand the impacts and vibrations to which it is subjected in heavy equipment, the lights are tested in a shaker. It shakes the light with different accelerations at different frequencies in order to check that nothing breaks. Vibrations in the light’s various materials are also analysed in the shaker to identify any resonance frequencies.

“If we discover that a material in the light starts to oscillate, we will have to address the design in order to eliminate
this,” says Anders.

SALT SPRAY CHAMBER

In the salt spray chamber, the lights or their components are sprayed with a mist of distilled water mixed with salt. This is done to test how TYRI’s materials withstand corrosion.

“White rust normally appears in this type of test, and is completely harmless. What we watch out for is the emergence of iron oxide rust, which can affect the quality of the light. We have recently started using a new kind of coating on our light housings, which has shown significantly better corrosion resistance than the coating previously used. We could confirm this after hard testing in the salt spray chamber,” says Anders.

DUST TESTING

In mines, on farmlands, and in essentially all environments where heavy vehicles are used, there is dust. To ensure that TYRI’s lighting can cope with all extreme environments, it must be able to withstand fine-grained dust. In dust testing – which is carried out to determine how well the lights are sealed – the lights are exposed to vacuum and dust is dispersed.

“We work from international guidelines for dust testing. The guidelines describe, among other things, the required size of the dust grains and the degree of vacuum. This test is incredibly efficient to conduct in-house instead of engaging with external testing institutes, which often have relatively long waiting times,” says Anders.

GONIOPHOTOMETER & INTEGRATING SPHERE

An important part of the testing process is when the distribution and character of light are tested. “In our goniophotometer we can precisely measure the width and length of the light beam from different angles in order to obtain a representation of the light beam’s propagation. From these measurements we also glean information about the luminous flux, luminous intensity and half-value angle. In the integrating sphere we measure the color temperature of the light as well as the color rendering index, and we can compare how closely we are able to emulate sunlight, since sunlight is usually considered optimal,” explains Anders.

AN EVOLVING LABORATORY

“Today we subject our lights to extreme heat and cold in our environmental chamber to make sure that the products
perform in all conditions and the toughest environments. And we measure luminous flux in another device. Our hope is that we will soon be able to test both temperature and luminous flux simultaneously, which will both streamline the testing process and enable us to study other results. That would allow us to see how illumination is affected when the light is extremely cold or overheated,” says Anders. Following TYRI’s development of INTELLilight – intelligent lighting controlled via an app – the need arose for new types of tests in the lab.

“We don’t yet know exactly which tests will be required from my side going forward, but we anticipate increased standard tests in the lab to ensure the sustainable development of the wireless INTELLilight. Since we are now introducing new technology with which to work, we will start to regularly conduct software testing and be sure to maintain the app,” says Anders.