Product performance-evaluation using Monte Carlo simulation: a case study

Product performance evaluation in the room and in the extreme environmental conditions is one of the most important design engineering activities. Is the product designed to operate within the specified tolerances over the specified environment and are the product performance parameters optimized so that the effects of the environmental stresses are minimized? These are the questions that a design engineer has to answer before any new product is released to the market. Therefore, environmental testing and monitoring of the product outputs, intended design performance and other product design parameters need to be performed. Such tests may include significant number of samples, may be time consuming and very costly. Consequently, environmental tests should be designed and planned very carefully and the data analysis methodologies should require the minimum resources for data collection. The proposed methodology is based on the idea of the product performance modeling and monitoring the performance degradation over the range of the environmental stresses. It is very flexible and is applicable in all situations when a product's performance can be modeled with a linear or nonlinear functions, whose parameters may be random, correlated and stress dependent. It provides the tools for performance stress evaluation and reliability estimation. The methodology is presented through the following case study.