Statistical Design of Accelerated Fatigue Life Tests for Qualification

Accelerated fatigue life testing of a product under development may be conducted as a key component of the reliability qualification program to assess whether the product can be expected to survive with high probability for a prescribed length of time at the design stress level. Planning of such testing can be facilitated and improved by an understanding of how inferences for extreme percentiles of the fatigue life distribution are likely to be affected by different choices regarding overall test sample size, the number of stress levels at which units are tested, and the distribution of sample size among the test levels.