Laboratory reliability demonstration test considerations

An automotive company's goal is to design and manufacture vehicles that meet the needs and expectations of its customers. Laboratory (lab) testing is a critical step in developing vehicle components or systems. It allows the design engineer to evaluate the design early in the product development process. Establishing a good lab-test minimum-life requirement (bogey) is an important task for the engineer in order to provide a reliable product. When applying the techniques in this paper to the automotive industry, the test procedures can be generalized to any situation for which the Weibull distribution (with known shape parameter) appropriately describes failure behavior, and for which accelerated lab-tests are being correlated with field-test data. This paper covers approaches for determining reliability-test target development, lab-test bogey conversion, and the quantity of test samples (and the test length) which must be tested to meet the reliability demonstration target requirement.