Accelerated life testing is the process of testing a product by subjecting it to conditions (stress, strain, temperatures etc.) in excess of its normal service parameters in an effort to uncover faults and potential modes of failure in a short amount of time. By analyzing the product's response to such tests, engineers can make prediction about the service life and maintenance intervals of a product. To accelerate a test, engineers use several techniques. Commonly, the rate of loading is increased. For example, an automotive suspension spring may be tested at several hundred compression–rebound cycles per minute. In service, the spring may experience one hundred or fewer cycles per minute. As a result, the spring fails sooner, but at the same number of cycles, so good data is collected, but in a much shorter time than it could be gathered in the actual application.
In polymers, testing may be done at elevated temperatures to produce a result in a shorter amount of time than it could be produced at ambient temperatures. Many mechanical properties of polymers have an Arrhenius type relationship with respect to time and temperature (for example, creep, stress relaxation, and tensile properties). If one conducts short tests at elevated temperatures, that data can be used to extrapolate the behavior of the polymer at room temperature, avoiding the need to do lengthy, and hence expensive tests.