Reliability assessment and lifetime prediction of degradation processes considering recoverable shock damages

Abstract

Many products degrade over time and their degradation processes could be affected by instantaneous shocks during field usage. Instantaneous shocks can cause incremental increases to the degradation signals through shock damages, and can also increase the degradation rates of products. In practice, some kinds of products can recover fully or partially from shock damages in a certain period of time. In this article, a degradation model for soft failure is proposed considering continuous degradation processes with recoverable shock damages for reliability assessment and lifetime prediction of products. The random component of the degradation processes is characterized by a Wiener process and the effect of instantaneous shocks on the degradation process is expressed by an exponential function with a residual effect for either partial or full recovery. The impact of shocks affecting the degradation rate is established to be proportional to the shock size. The resulting model includes some existing models as its special cases and can easily be extended to cases where the degradation process follows other random processes with independent increments. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the applications of the proposed model. Sensitivity analysis and validation of the two-stage parameter estimation approach are conducted based on the simulation.

Keywords:

• Recoverable shock damage
• partial recovery
• full recovery
• soft failure
• Wiener process
• reliability assessment

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tingting Huang

Dr. Tingting Huang is an assistant professor at the School of Reliability and Systems Engineering, Beihang University, China. She was awarded her PhD by the School of Reliability and Systems Engineering, Beihang University in 2010. She worked as a postdoctoral fellow for the Department of Industrial Engineering, Tsinghua University in 2011. She was awarded her MS degree from the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Virginia Tech in 2014. She was a visiting scholar in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Rutgers University, USA in 2008. Her research interests are prognostics and health management, and statistical quality monitoring. She is an IEEE member.

Yuepu Zhao

Yuepu Zhao is a graduate student at the School of Reliability and Systems Engineering, Beihang University, China. His research interests are degradation modeling and lifetime prediction for degradation tests. His recent work considers the modeling of degradation processes of products with recoverable shock damage.

David W. Coit

Dr. David W. Coit is a professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Rutgers University, and a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University. He teaches and conducts research in systems reliability modeling and optimization, energy systems optimization, and reliability and maintainability theory. He has been awarded several NSF grants, including a CAREER grant to develop new reliability optimization algorithms considering uncertainty. He is a department editor for IISE Transactions, an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Reliability and an associate editor for Journal of Risk and Reliability, He received a BS degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University, an MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and MS and PhD in industrial engineering from the University of Pittsburgh.

Loon-Ching Tang

Dr. Loon Ching Tang is a professor at the Department of Industrial Systems Engineering & Management and the Director of Temasek Defence Systems Institute in National University of Singapore. He is currently a lead PI of the Future Resilient Systems Program funded by the National Research Foundation of Singapore. His research interest lies in the application of operations research tools, particularly statistics, probability and optimization techniques, for solving real problems from industries; ranging from those in the area of RAMS to those related to systems design and improvement. He is the co-editor-in-chief of Quality and Reliability Engineering International and has been on the editorial review board of the Journal of Quality Technology.