A highly accelerated stress reliability growth test method

Abstract Reliability growth test (RGT) is one of the main methods to improve product reliability. In order to effectively solve the problem of short development cycles faced by enterprises, the accelerated reliability growth test (ARGT) is developed. Since the traditional ARGT is carried out separately under all of the accelerated stress levels, and the time of RGT is too long under low accelerated stress levels. So, a highly accelerated stress reliability growth test (HARGT) is proposed, where the RGT is designed to carry out at the highest accelerated stress level. Firstly, AMSAA model is adopted to track the reliability growth process under the highest accelerated stress level, and its parameters are determined by the maximum likelihood estimation method. Secondly, taking temperature as the accelerated stress, the relationship of the reliability with different accelerated stress levels is established under the accelerated life test (ALT) in the first stage. Based on the Arrhenius model and combined with the acceleration coefficient, the product reliability at the end of the test is extrapolated to the product reliability at the normal stress level. The parameters of the Arrhenius model are got through the least square estimation method, and the acceleration coefficient and equation are also obtained. Finally, a case study on the communication service system is given to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.