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Client: Hewlett-Packard Headquarters: |
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THE INVENTOR OF HALT AND HASS Gregg K. Hobbs, Ph.D., a Registered Professional Engineer in California in Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, and Control System Engineering, is the originator of and world leader in the principles of HALT and HASS. He has been a consulting engineer since 1978, specializing in the fields of stress screening, robust and flaw tolerant design, dynamic analysis, and testing. He has been employed as a consultant by many leading companies in the aerospace, commercial, military, and industrial fields and has taught at two major universities as Adjunct Professor (Visiting Full Professor). He has taught courses on these subjects in the USA, Asia, Canada, Europe, the UK, Africa, the South Pacific, Middle-East and Mexico. He has introduced, and continues to introduce, many new concepts, techniques, and equipment that have been proven by 36 years extensive use on many products, resulting in the savings of several billions of dollars. He has acted as "facilitator" for companies beginning to use these methods and has led teams that enhanced designs using the techniques, selected equipment, and then developed production screens. The inventor of 14 patents on accelerated testing equipment (several more pending), Dr. Hobbs has written many important papers on accelerated techniques and has introduced a number of new concepts in various other technical fields. His book, HALT & HASS, Accelerated Reliability Engineering, is now in its second edition and is available from Hobbs Engineering. Over the past 30 years, Dr. Hobbs has shown thousands of engineers throughout the world how to improve the quality of their products through the application of his HALT and HASS accelerated reliability techniques. RapidHALT™, introduced in 2003, has reduced the time in HALT substantially. Other significant improvements in the HALT and HASS methodologies were made by Dr. Hobbs in 2004. HyperHALT™ was introduced in 2007. New Product Patents Four new patents were issued to Dr. Hobbs for all-axis shakers and associated hardware to tune the spectra and balance axes. All of the new patents are on aspects of vibration equipment to perform HALT & HASS methods. The system consists of low and high frequency exciters integrated to deliver broadband vibration (0 to 10,000 Hz). Low frequency vibration levels using hydraulic or electrodynamic excitation result in complete control of the low frequency vibration spectra as well as axis balancing and these levels can far exceed transportation environments providing time compression for HALT applications. The high frequency behavior is like that of repeated impact shakers except that there are now spectra shaping, axes balancing and roll-off of high frequencies available. The high frequency portion need not have active excitation installed as three of the patents cover passive excitation and spectra shaping. The high frequency modular system allows changing fixtures and tuning parameters from one product to another in seconds. Therefore, the system can be used for multiple products in HALT & HASS applications with each application independently tuned. |
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Gregg was admired and respected throughout the world. He was the inventor of the HALT & HASS techniques, which has saved companies millions of dollars in the prevention of product failures. As Bill Rollins (Raytheon Missile) said, “He encountered a lot of controversy within the environmental testing arena on his efforts to promote HALT, but he always was a bit of a Maverick.” Now these techniques are being used in most industries all over the world. He has founded several companies, Hobbs Engineering which has been doing seminars on Reliability improvement for the past 32 years; he started two manufacturing companies for HALT testing, most recently HALT and HASS Systems; and opened Time Compression Labs, for HALT testing.. He published a book Accelerated Reliability Engineering: HALT & HASS and has published many papers in a wide variety of technical publications. He has been the sole author of 14 patents. “His contributions to the world of engineering are larger, I suspect, than even he realized” per Mike Daily (Sandia National Labs). Gregg shared his knowledge with businesses all over the world: Australia, South Africa, Europe, Canada, New Zealand, Middle East, Far East and Mexico. Not to mention all over the United States! Some comments from Geoff Lee, Neil Cheyne & Gerald Duncan from New Zealand: “Many of us have learnt from his courses and books, and we continue to apply the HALT chamber that Gregg designed. Gregg created and shared industry-leading methods to improve product reliability, from which many companies have benefitted. Gregg's contribution to Fisher & Paykel Appliances was extremely valuable. The legacy of his contribution will be that Fisher and Paykel continues to use HALT/HASS techniques and what we learnt from Gregg will be an ongoing benefit to our products, our company and our customers.” We will all miss Gregg immensely. We hope that his legacy will live on forever and know that without him the world is a sadder place. Virgina Hobbs Recent Papers ELIMINATION OF THE NO DEFECT FOUND PROBLEM
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