If you're a blender, you'd never want to see the inside of the testing lab in Blendtec's headquarters in Orem, UT. This small room is the equivalent of the Tower of London for blenders - the products that go in don't usually come out in one piece. "We call [the test facility] 'the Torture Chamber' because we line up all of our blenders and brutally test them until they die," admits Reid Stout, a research and development engineer with Blendtec. If you're an automaker, conducting a destructive test on your product means crashing a fully built car rigged with dummies into a wall - a costly experiment you can't undertake willy-nilly. If you're an aerospace manufacturer, crash-testing a plane for every new model is certainly out of the question. To bypass these costly tests involving massive products (not to mention the cleanup required afterward), manufacturers now rely mostly on digital simulation and software-driven analysis to perform tests. But if you make blenders like Blendtec does, you can afford to sacrifice a few blenders every month for the good of your customers.
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