Reasons can include: to determine breaking points and safe usage limits; to confirm that the intended specifications are being met; to search for issues inside of a product; to determine modes of failure (how exactly a system may fail), and to test stable operation of a part or system outside standard usage.
[1] The term stress test as it relates to hardware (including electronics, physical devices, nuclear power plants, etc.)
These can include extremes of workload, type of task, memory use, thermal load (heat), clock speed, or voltages.
Software that is suitable for torture testing should typically run instructions that utilise the entire chip rather than only a few of its units.
The author first discusses that a classical steady state model commonly used for simulation of electric hot water heaters can be inaccurate.
Then this paper presents results from hardware testing which demonstrate that systems of water heaters under Model Predictive Control can be reliably dispatched to deliver set-point levels of power to within 2% error.
Then the author presents experiment result which shows a promising pathway to control hot water heaters as energy storage systems is capable of delivering flexible capacity and fast acting ancillary services on a firm basis.
It first discusses how the growth in safety-critical applications for automotive electronics significant increases the IC design reliability challenge.