MIL-STD-810

MIL-STD-810, U.S. Department of Defense Test Method Standard, Environmental Engineering Considerations and Laboratory Tests, is a United States Military Standard that specifies environmental tests to determine whether equipment is suitably designed to survive the conditions that it would experience throughout its service life. The standard establishes chamber test methods that replicate the effects of environments on the equipment rather than imitating the environments themselves. Although prepared specifically for U.S. military applications, the standard is often applied for commercial products as well.

The standard's guidance and test methods are intended to:

MIL-STD-810G was replaced by MIL-STD-810H in 2019. In 2022, MIL-STD-810H Change Notice 1 was released. As of 2024, the latest version is MIL-STD-810H with Change Notice 1.

MIL-STD-810 is maintained by a Tri-Service partnership that includes the United States Air Force, Army, and Navy. The U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command, or ATEC, serves as Lead Standardization Activity / Preparing Activity, and is chartered under the Defense Standardization Program (DSP) with maintaining the functional expertise and serving as the DoD-wide technical focal point for the standard. The Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology is the Administrator for WG-DTE043: MIL-STD-810, the Working Group tasked with reviewing the current environmental testing guidance and recommending improvements to the DOD Tri-Service Working Group.

MIL-STD-810 addresses a broad range of environmental conditions that include: low pressure for altitude testing; exposure to high and low temperatures plus temperature shock (both operating and in storage); rain (including wind blown and freezing rain); humidity, fungus, salt fog for corrosion testing; sand and dust exposure; explosive atmosphere; leakage; acceleration; shock and transport shock; gunfire vibration; and random vibration. The standard describes environmental management and engineering processes that can be of enormous value to generate confidence in the environmental worthiness and overall durability of a system design. The standard contains military acquisition program planning and engineering direction to consider the influences that environmental stresses have on equipment throughout all phases of its service life. The document does not impose design or test specifications. Rather, it describes the environmental conditioning process that results in realistic materiel designs and test methods based on materiel system performance requirements.

Finally, there are limitations inherent in laboratory testing that make it imperative to use proper engineering judgment to extrapolate laboratory results to results that may be obtained under actual service conditions. In many cases, real-world environmental stresses (singularly or in combination) cannot be duplicated in test laboratories. Therefore, users should not assume that an item that passes laboratory testing also will pass field/fleet verification tests.

In 1945, the Army Air Force (AAF) released the first specification providing a formal methodology for testing equipment under simulated environmental conditions. That document, entitled AAF Specification 41065, Equipment: General Specification for Environmental Test of, is the direct ancestor of MIL-STD-810. In 1965, the USAF released a technical report with data and information on the origination and development of natural and induced environmental tests intended for aerospace and ground equipment. By using that document, the design engineer obtained a clearer understanding of the interpretation, application, and relationship of environmental testing to military equipment and materiel.

The Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology (IEST), a non-profit technical society, released the publication History and Rationale of MIL-STD-810 to capture the thought process behind the evolution of MIL-STD-810. It also provides a development history of test methods, rationale for many procedural changes, tailoring guidance for many test procedures, and insight into the future direction of the standard.