ACCELERATED LIFE TESTING

There is a wide variety of reliability testing methodologies and objectives. They include testing to determine the potential failure mechanisms, reliability demonstration testing, reliability acceptance testing, reliability prediction testing using accelerated life testing (ALT), and others. This chapter provides a brief description of these different types of testing with emphasis on ALT, design of test plans and modeling, and analysis of degradation testing. It discusses different type of reliability testing such as highly accelerated life testing, reliability growth test, highly accelerated stress screening, reliability demonstration test, reliability acceptance test, burn-in test, and accelerated life testing and accelerated degradation testing. ALT is usually conducted by subjecting the product (or component) to more severe conditions than those which the product will be experiencing at normal conditions or by using the product more intensively than in normal use without changing the normal operating conditions.