Optimum Step Stress Accelerated Life Testing For Rayleigh Distribution

Accelerated testing is needed when testing even large sample sizes at use stress would yield few or no failures within a reasonable time. The step-stress accelerated life test is used to increase the stress levels at fixed times during the experiment. Th is paper deals with the problem of designing an optimu m step stress accelerated life test for Rayleigh distribution. The scale parameter of the distribution is assumed to be a log linear function of stress. The maximu m likelihood estimates of the parameters under consideration are obtained. Interval estimation that generates narrow intervals to the unknown parameters of the distribution with high probability is obtained. Optimizat ion criterion is also discussed and simu lation results are obtained to explain the techniques used in the paper.