Accelerated reliability demonstration and assurance test design

Abstract

This paper, shows how the fixed duration and reliability assurance tests, time and cost prohibitive in the past, can be accelerate to achieve two fold advantage: to determine item (product) reliability as it is related to its actual use stresses, and to considerable shorten the test time, to accommodate reasonable cost and tight program schedules. While traditional tests of this type were modeled mathematically to produce the measure of reliability as MTBF with the assumption of all failure rates being constant, there is little or no guidance on what the environmental and operational stresses need to be applied during the test.