Ed - I feel your pain. A non—expert. Simply disagrees with the science because he can’t understand it. He has a hammer and your ESD status is his nail. We went through the exact same thing. Validation testing data, historical field data (service AND instrument fault data), and had a world expert in ESD state that we had the appropriate design to not require ESD protection and we lost.
There are really good auditors out there and there are really bad ones.
There are really good auditors out there and there are really bad ones.
You can have a part tested, but ESD damage can take time to form. Think of it as a sort of internal corrosion, which is what its appearance resembled when I looked at an example with x-ray imaging. Over time the corrosion worsens to the point where signal will be lost or interrupted.