Even though different meanings could be attributed to environmental enginering, a large number of scientists and engineers agree that it is the ensemble of studies, design and experimental techniques, data processing procedures and applications, where the focus is on the interaction between the environment and the performance of products and engineering systems with reference to their entire life-cycle. According to this statement, environment could be intended as the natural climate and air pollution or mechanical environmental conditions experienced by equipment during its use. Care in these applications is devoted to the wheatering effects on materials and equipments and reliability assessment of them, which should be based on suitable environmental stress screening.

Many and very important industrial sectors are involved in these topics, including aerospace, automotive, defense, electronics, science of materials and so on.
Environmental testing is a very important approach to face these application, based on standardized and customized experimental test bench, real time and accelerated testing programs, data acquisition and processing, interlaboratory comparison.

Based on the above considerations, topics of interest for this Special Session (SpSe) include, but are not limited to:
• the design, development and qualification of new sensors, measurement systems and methods for environmental test benches;
• experiments/simulation interaction for results quality improvement and usefulness;
• virtual testing and digital twin
• uncertainty assessment in experimental testing;
• solutions for reproducibility of data;
• data driven reliability models
• product reliability assessment;
• test procedures for wheatering and vibration load assessment;
• digitalization impact on environmental testing
• standardization proposal.
Some limited interactions can be envisaged with topics of technical committees TC10, TC,19 TC22, even though the aim of studying the environmental effects should guarantee a very specific signature of the papers to be proposed for this SpSe.