To meet increasing competition, get products to market in the shortest possible time, and satisfy heightened customer expectations, products must be made more robust and fewer failures must be observed in a short development period. In this circumstance, assessing product reliability based on degradation data at high stress levels becomes necessary. This assessment is accomplished through accelerated degradation tests (ADT). These tests involve over stress testing in which instead of life product performance is measured as it degrades over time. Due to the role these tests play in determining proper reliability estimates for the product, it is necessary to scientifically design these test plans so as to save time and expense and provide more accurate estimates of reliability for a given number of test units and test time. In ADTs, several decision variables such as inspection frequency,the sample size, and the termination time at each stress level are important.
In this research, an optimal plan is developed for the design of accelerated degradation test with a reciprocal Weibull degradation data using the mean time to failure (MTTF) as the minimizing criteria. A non linear integer programming problem is developed under the constraint that the total experimental cost does not exceed a pre-determined budget. The optimal combination of sample size, inspection frequency and the termination time at each stress level is found. A case example based on Light Emitting Diode (LED) example is used to illustrate the proposed method. Sensitivity analyses on the cost parameters and the parameters of the underlying probability distribution are performed to assess the robustness of the proposed method.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:USF/oai:scholarcommons.usf.edu:etd-2201 |
| Date | 01 September 2004 |
| Creators | Polavarapu, Indira |
| Publisher | Scholar Commons |
| Source Sets | University of South Flordia |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Graduate Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | default |
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