Acceleration-

'Sudden' acceleration is the cause of damage in many products. Keep in mind that acceleration includes 'deceleration' and 'change of direction' of moving items. Acceleration is quite an extensive category, but it can be basically broken into (1) impulse, or one-time, quick acceleration and (2) periodic, or vibrations. Damage from either of these types of acceleration can occur from unexpectedly rough treatment during any of the handling processes previously mention.

Examples of common Acceleration caused product failures:

• Dropping (especially portable and handheld products).
• Vibrations during packing, shipping, unpacking and installation.
• Sudden jolts while changing batteries or doing other maintenance.
• Service and repair mishandling.
• Internal motor or battery mountings that break under stress when the product used in rugged environments.
• Dropping a container of juice can cause pressure on an inadequately designed dispensing valve causing liquid to leak through the value or allowing bacteria to enter the container.
• Poorly designed handling features on protective containers allow one to easily drop the container.
• Slippery housings on some clamshell cell phones make the phones very prone to dropping by people with very dry skin.

Not only may a product be susceptible to damage from acceleration, but the shipping and storage packaging materials may also be vulnerable. Consequently, packaging must also be designed and tested for damaging 'accelerations'. Packaging is not only used for ease of handling, transportation and display purposes, but also for protecting the product.

Think about this... many people assume that to ship a product all you need to do is to put it in a box, put the box on the truck at the plant and then the same truck unloads it when it gets to the customer. In fact a normal UPS box or FedEx is probably handling 15- 20 times just to ship it across the state. Many opportunities to drop the box…