Reliability Assessment for a Certain Type of Electrical Connector Based on Accelerated Degradation Data

Since a certain type of electrical connector belongs to the product which has high reliability and long lifetime,it is difficult to obtain failure-to-time data in short time.For assessing the reliability of the product,a step-stress accelerated degradation test was designed on the base of analyzing failure mechanism and then the reliability function at the normal use stress level was extrapolated from the accelerated degradation data.Contact resistance was taken as the performance index and temperature was used as accelerated stress at the testing.When analyzing the degradation data,Wiener process was adopted to model the degradation process.A maximum likelihood function integrating all the degradation data was established for improving the accuray of estimation.When extrapolating the reliability at the working temperature level,equivalent temperature was applied to represent the comprehensive effects of several temerature levels since the working temperature was variable.Results showed that the proposed method based on analyzing accelerated degradation data was practical and effective,it realized the reliability assessment of the electrical connector and could be extended to evaluate the reliability of other highly reliable products.