A Practical Application of Quantitative Accelerated Life Testing in Power Systems Engineering

Demonstrating product reliability is a common challenge within industry, and one that has become continuously more difficult to address due to the marketplace demands for decreased development time and cost. This challenge presents industry with new constraints as proven reliability assessment techniques are becoming increasingly difficult to apply due to the test duration standing in conflict with resource demands placed on engineering organizations. These limitations represent the main influence behind this paper, which explores an alternative reliability demonstration approach using quantitative accelerated life testing (QALT). Accelerated life testing is a reliability discipline that has been the focus of much research, and from which a great many publications have been derived. Yet many proposed approaches can be difficult to apply within industry due to the aforementioned resource constraints, and therefore an alternative methodology will be proposed that delivers accurate reliability data within the aforementioned constraints, thus addressing the limitations imposed by conventional reliability demonstration tests.