Reliability assessment of switching process control equipment

The paper is devoted to the assessment of the reliability of switching equipment to control technological processes in alternating current circuits based on the results of normal tests for switching wear resistance. The paper provides an overview of solving practical problems of obtaining quantitative reliability characteristics in conditions of a small volume of initial statistical data. The results of studies of magnetic starters with a nominal resource of 200 thousand commutations, during which the linear wear of contacts was controlled by changing their residual life, are presented. A method to evaluate the reliability indicator and to test statistical hypotheses based on censored statistical information is considered, which allows us to obtain an adequate model of the reliability (uptime) of starters based on randomly censored samples. The most truthful law of reliability of switching equipment is revealed from among those laws that are most often used in applied statistical analysis.