Design and Analysis of Accelerated Tests for Mission Critical Reliability

Early approaches to accelerated testing were based on the assumption that there was a simple acceleration factor that would correspond to a linear scaling of time from the operating stress to the accelerating stress. This corresponds to the simplest physical model of the kinetics governing the underlying degradation, but this simple model does not always hold. We need to understand what more complex physical models may look like. Design & Analysis of Accelerated Tests for Mission Critical Reliability presents innovative theory and methods for recognizing and handling the more complicated, cases often encountered in practice. The theory integrates a physical understanding of underlying phenomena and the statistical modeling of observation "noise" to provide a single theoretical framework for accelerated testing. The treatment includes general approaches that can be used with various computational software packages and an explicit computing environment in S-PLUS. Source code written by the authors is included and available for download from http://www.crcpress.com/e_products/downloads. For practitioners, this book provides immediately useable tools. For researchers, it presents intriguing open questions. And for the academic community, numerous worked examples, end-of-chapter exercises, and a format that relegates technical and theoretical details to chapter appendices make this an outstanding supplementary textbook for senior and graduate-level students.

Table of Contents:
BACKGROUND Introduction Other Approaches The Foundation of our Approach An Example The Organization of this Book Complement to Chapter 1: Background Kinetics and Statistics DEMARCATION MAPPING: INITIAL DESIGN OF ACCELERATED TESTS Analytical Theory of Thermal Demarcation Maps Designing an Acceptance Test for a Purely Thermal Process Simple Temperature Humidity Models Designing an Acceptance Test for a Temperature Humidity Model Mechanical Cycling Models Acceptance Testing for Mechanical Cycling Induced by Thermal Cycling Computational Demarcation Mapping Beta Binomial Interpretation of 0 Failures An Extrapolation Theorem Summary Complements to Chapter 2 INTERFACE FOR BUILDING KINETIC MODELS Descriptions and Concepts Behind the Interface Complement to Chapter 3, Our Interface in S-PLUS®, Kinetic Data Objects and the GUIs to Create Them EVANESCENT PROCESS MAPPING Building Blocks for the Theory Identifying Neighborhoods of Models, Sampling, and "Chunking" Example Summary, Limitations of Accelerated Testing Complement to Chapter 4: Using the Evanescent Process Mapping Interface to duplicate example 4.3 DATA ANALYSIS FOR FAILURE TIME DATA A Simple Data Set Adding Physical Sense to the Model Analysis of a Real Data Set Complement: Maximum Likelihood Analysis Complement: Statistical Estimation of Kinetics from Failure Time Data Complement: Pseudo Maximum Likelihood Estimation Complement: The Kaplan Meier Estimate Complement: Printed Wiring Board Data Complement: Using the Interface Complement: Exercises to Explore some Questions in Experiment Design DATA ANALYSIS FOR DEGRADATION DATA Motivation and Models Background for the Example Data Analysis for the Example Complement: Background Statistical Theory Complement: Using the Software to Analyse the Example Data Complement: Exercises for Data Analysis and Experiment Design