TITLE: Equivalency of Accelerated Life Testing Plans under Different Stress Loadings

SPEAKER: Professor E. A. Elsayed

ABSTRACT:

Accelerated Life Testing (ALT) is designed and conducted to obtain failure observations in a short time by subjecting test units to severer than normal operating conditions and use the data for reliability prediction. Many types of stress loadings such as constant-stress, step-stress and cyclic-stress can be utilized when conducting ALT. Extensive research has been conducted on the analysis of ALT data obtained under constant stress loading. However, the equivalency of ALT experiments involving different stress loadings has not been investigated. In this paper, we provide definitions for the equivalency of test plans, general equivalent ALT plans and some special types of equivalent ALT plans are explored. For demonstration, a constant-stress ALT and a ramp-stress ALT for miniature lamps are presented and their equivalency is investigated.