Product Life and Reliability Assessment

In this chapter, the authors devote themselves to discussions of product life estimation and reliability assessment. Estimating a product's life is a necessity and a challenging task for a company. A product's life is also product's time to fail (TTF). The authors illustrate how average mean time‐to‐fail (MTTF) can be obtained from a failure rate density function, and how MTTF can be modeled as a function environmental or current density variables. From the model, the results from harsher test conditions are then used to predict the MTTF (or the product's Life) of products at normal operating conditions. Reliability assessments are necessary to remove the potential failure modes, in addition to product life prediction. Many trades groups are interested in establishing reliability assessment standards for obvious reason: reliability is a vital part of their industry.