Optimal Design for Accelerated Destructive Degradation Tests

• Activity Number: 243
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 5, 2013 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences
• Author(s): Chih-Chun Tsai*+ and Sheng-Tsaing Tseng and Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan and Chien-Tai Lin
• Companies: Tamkang University and Institute of Statistics, National Tsing-Hua University and McMaster University and Tamkang University
• Keywords: Highly reliable products ; Accelerated destructive degradation tests ; Optimal test plan

Abstract

Degradation tests are powerful and useful tools for lifetime assessment of highly reliable products. In some applications, the degradation measurement process would destroy the physical characteristic of units when tested at higher than usual stress levels of an accelerating variable, so that only one measurement can be made on each tested unit during the degradation testing. An accelerated degradation test giving rise to such a degradation data is called an accelerated destructive degradation test (ADDT). The specification of the size of the total sample, the frequency of destructive measurements, the number of measurements at each stress level, and other decision variables are very important to plan and conduct an ADDT efficiently. Motivated by a polymer data, this article deals with the problem of designing an ADDT with a nonlinear model. Under the constraint that the total experimental cost does not exceed a pre-fixed budget, the optimal test plan is obtained by minimizing the asymptotic variance of the estimated 100pth percentile of the product's lifetime distribution at the use condition.