Laboratory reliability demonstration test considerations

An automotive company's goal is to design and manufacture vehicles that mee t the needs and expectations of its customers, Laboratory (lab) testing is a critical step in developing vehicle components or systems. It allows the design engineer to evaluate the design early in the product development pro cess. Establishing a good lab-test minimum-life requirement (bogey) is an i mportant task for the engineer in order to provide a reliable product, When applying the techniques in this paper to the automotive industry, the test procedures can be generalized to any situation for which the Weibull distr ibution (with known shape parameter) appropriately describes failure behavi or, and for which accelerated lab-tests are being correlated with field-tes t data. This paper covers approaches for determining reliability-test targe t development, lab-test bogey conversion, and the quantity of test samples (and the test length) which must be tested to meet the reliability demonstr ation target requirement.