About Trends in the Strategy of Development Accelerated Reliability and Durability Testing Technology 2012-01-0206

Accelerated Life Testing (ALT) is now the primary source for obtaining initial information for predicting a product's reliability, durability and maintainability. This paper shows that such testing fails to offer relevant information, because the product's degradation process in testing conditions differs substantially from the product's degradation process under field conditions. Consequently, the mean-time-to-failure is skewed, resulting in problems with recalls, reliability, and maintainability.

Accelerated reliability and durability testing technology (ART/ADT) is an approach to the problem which can improve the situation with more accurate prediction of reliability and durability. Trends in the strategy of development of this technology include development of the ART/ADT basic components: to test by increasing step-by-step, through combined testing, the number and quality of simultaneously simulated parameters until this number approaches the actual number of parameters anticipated in the field; development testing analysis and management of degradation (failures) and their causes, with subsequent recommendation of the causes elimination; technology of accurate prediction. The above number of parameters include full input influences, safety, and human factors. The causes include cultural and scientific-technical types. This offers the potential to predict desirable field performance and thus accelerate beneficial product development. Alas, this dynamic approach to testing is seldom used. This paper shows the many reasons why and how one can overcome the obstacles.