Research on Reliability Assessment of Mechanical Equipment Based on the Performance–Feature Model

There is a growing body of literature which recognizes the importance of mechanical equipment reliability during processing, and reliability assessment is important in guaranteeing the precision, function, and use life span of mechanical equipment. For products with a long lifetime and high reliability, it is difficult to assess lifetime and reliability using traditional statistical inference based on a large sample of data from the lifetime test. Therefore, this study contributed to this growing area of research, through a reliability evaluation method based on degradation path distribution related to signal characteristics. In this research, an effective method for reliability assessment was constructed, in which the signal features of the machining process were used to replace traditional time data and fit equipment degradation model. The pseudo failure characteristic (PFC) was obtained according to the failure threshold and the reliability curve was plotted by a PFC distribution model. Experimental investigation on tool reliability assessment was used to verify the effectiveness of this method, in which the trend that tool wear changes with the features was fitted by a Gaussian distribution function and Logarithmic distribution function, to obtain a better tool degradation model. The results illustrated the model could evaluate reliability of mechanical equipment effectively.