MECHANICAL COMPONENT LIFETIME ESTIMATION BASED ON ACCELERATED LIFE TESTING WITH SINGULARITY EXTRAPOLATION

Abstract Life testing under nominal operating conditions of mechanical parts with high mean lifetime between failure (MTBF) often consumes a significant amount of time and resources, rendering such procedures expensive and impractical. As a result, the technology of accelerated life testing (ALT) has been developed for testing at high stress levels (e.g. temperature, voltage, pressure, corrosive media, load, vibration amplitude, etc.) so that it can be extrapolated—through a physically reasonable statistical model—to obtain estimations of life at lower, normal stress levels or even limit stress levels. However, the issue of prediction accuracy associated with extrapolating data outside the range of testing, or even to a singularity level (no stress), has not yet been fully addressed. In this research, an accelerator factor is introduced into an inverse power law model to estimate the life distribution in terms of time and stresses. Also, a generalized Eyring model is set up for singularity extrapolation in handling limit stress level conditions. The procedure to calibrate the associated shape factors based on the maximum likelihood principle is also formulated. The methodology implementation, based on a one-main-step, multiple-step-stress test scheme, is experimentally illustrated with tapered roller bearing under the stress of environmental corrosion as a case study. The experimental results show that the developed accelerated life test model can effectively evaluate the life probability of a bearing based on accelerated testing data when extrapolating to the stress levels within or outside the range of testing.