Estimating Reliability Performance with Accelerated Life Tests

Most manufacturers today recognize the criticality of developing products that will perform reliably during the useful life of the product.  Inferior reliability performance alienates customers and significantly impairs brand and company reputations.  While product development actions related to ensuring reliability targets are met have increased substantially in recent years, several challenges remain. They include:

• Short product development timeframes
• Difficulty in observing product failures (needed for reliability estimation) in available testing timeframes
• Small sample sizes available for reliability testing

Accelerated Life Testing (ALT) methods may be utilized to overcome many of the challenges in standard reliability testing.  Quantitative Accelerated Life Testing involves identifying stress conditions that will accelerate the failure mode(s) so that failures may be observed in a shorter time period.  Failures observed at various stress conditions may be modelled and performance at normal use (or environmental) conditions may be predicted.

Webinar Objectives

• Understand how to accelerate product testing to estimate reliability in order to minimize risk in feasible timeframes
• Predict product performance rather than react to potential problems
• Develop confidence in adequate product reliability performance prior to launch

Webinar Agenda

This webinar will cover the following topics:

• Overview of Accelerated Life Testing
• Types of Stress Profiles
• Planning for an Accelerated Life Test (Sample Sizes, Stress Levels, Stress Profiles, etc.)
• Analyzing Accelerated Life Test Data
• Predicting Product Reliability Performance
• Correlating Accelerated Life Test Results with Actual Reliability Performance

Webinar Highlights

• Overall methodology for predicting reliability using accelerated life test methods
• Understand some of the pitfalls in this methodology
• Analyzing data from Accelerated Life tests
• Planning accelerated life tests (e.g. sample sizes, stress factors and levels)

Who Should Attend

The target audience includes personnel involved in product/process development and manufacturing

• Product Engineers
• Reliability Engineers
• Design Engineers
• Quality Engineers
• Quality Assurance Managers
• Project / Program Managers
• Manufacturing Personnel