HP Labs: the Science of Technology

HP Environmental Lab

Here's where things started to get fun, as the Environmental Lab has a variety of "torture chambers" that are used to test hardware, packaging, components, etc. in extreme conditions. What sort of extreme conditions and testing are we talking about? Let's first start by noting that the Environmental Lab tends to use destructive testing – so things are actually tested until they break. Destroying thousands of dollars of hardware a day can't help but be entertaining, right? I think one of the HP engineers stated that the labs destroy over $5000 of hardware a day in their testing. It's not just destroyed for laughs, of course – when a product does eventually fail, they then look at how and why it failed and determine if they can improve/fix the product to avoid a particular type of failure, or if the point at which the product failed is actually in the "safe" zone.

Testing included shock tests, where products are subjected to repeatable drops using heavy equipment; vibration testing basically had a gigantic subwoofer that would shake the products (usually for hours at a time). Another test area had a large metal compress that could be used for testing the durability of product packaging – so HP knows how many boxes/pallets they can stack on top of each other. Temperature, altitude, and humidity chambers could torture devices with extremes of heat/cold, altitude (pressure), or humidity. Most of these chambers were somewhat smaller in nature, designed to test individual products; we'll see other larger chambers in some of the other labs. There were also a variety of drop tests – ranging from a device to test how laptop hard drives would respond to shorter drops (with different drive cage material) up to larger tests for dropping products or packaging from several feet above the ground.

Of course not all of the environmental testing is destructive. One area of the labs was a moderate sized semi-anechoic chamber used for noise testing. (It's only "semi-anechoic" as the floor is still a hard surface, but the walls and ceiling all have noise-absorbing materials.) I've seen photos of anechoic chambers before, but this was my first time actually stepping inside of one. It's a very cool experience, and when everyone stopped moving/talking it was amazingly quiet – even with the noisy vibration testing machinery just a short walk down the hallway from the chamber! The level of silence was almost oppressive, and even talking in the room things sounded weird, as we're normally used to hearing reflections of our own voices bouncing off the walls and ceiling.

The chamber itself is of course used to conduct noise testing, and it's large enough to handle up to full server racks if needed. HP uses anywhere from one microphone (e.g. for an operator seated in front of a laptop) to as many as a dozen or so microphones for their noise testing. There are markings around the room for where microphones need to be located for specific types of testing, and the equipment is capable of measuring noise levels well below 20 dB, which is less than what most people would normally notice. There was a second smaller semi-anechoic chamber for testing noise emissions from smaller devices as well (e.g. smartphones and tablets), but we didn't spend much time in there as it could only hold a few people and we had already experienced the larger room.