Determination of burn‐in parameters and residual life for highly reliable products

Today, many products are designed and manufactured to function for a long period of time before they fail. Determining product reliability is a great challenge to manufacturers of highly reliable products with only a relatively short period of time available for internal life testing. In particular, it may be difficult to determine optimal burn‐in parameters and characterize the residual life distribution. A promising alternative is to use data on a quality characteristic (QC) whose degradation over time can be related to product failure. Typically, product failure corresponds to the first passage time of the degradation path beyond a critical value. If degradation paths can be modeled properly, one can predict failure time and determine the life distribution without actually observing failures. In this paper, we first use a Wiener process to describe the continuous degradation path of the quality characteristic of the product. A Wiener process allows nonconstant variance and nonzero correlation among data collected at different time points. We propose a decision rule for classifying a unit as normal or weak, and give an economic model for determining the optimal termination time and other parameters of a burn‐in test. Next, we propose a method for assessing the product's lifetime distribution of the passed units. The proposed methodologies are all based only on the product's initial observed degradation data. Finally, an example of an electronic product, namely contact image scanner (CIS), is used to illustrate the proposed procedure. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2003     

Properties of a mean residual life function arising from renewal theory

The present article discusses the properties of the mean residual life function in a renewal process. We examine the relationship this function has with the failure rate function and the conventional mean, variance and coefficient of variation of residual life. We also discuss some monotonicity properties of the mean residual life function. A partial order based on the renewal mean residual function is introduced along with its interrelationship with some existing stochastic orders. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2010     

Mean residual life of coherent systems consisting of multiple types of dependent components

Mean residual life is a useful dynamic characteristic to study reliability of a system. It has been widely considered in the literature not only for single unit systems but also for coherent systems. This article is concerned with the study of mean residual life for a coherent system that consists of multiple types of dependent components. In particular, the survival signature based generalized mixture representation is obtained for the survival function of a coherent system and it is used to evaluate the mean residual life function. Furthermore, two mean residual life functions under different conditional events on components’ lifetimes are also defined and studied.     

舰炮大型铸铝件断裂残余应力分析

采用盲孔法测试某型舰炮大型铸铝件残余应力,结果分析表明原结构中残余应力较大,部分位置残余应力超过材料屈服极限是其断裂的根本原因.通过工艺改进后,构件残余应力幅值大幅降低,满足工程要求.     

横向效应增强型弹垂直侵彻薄靶的轴向剩余速度理论分析

为了得到横向效应增强型弹（Penetration with Enhanced Lateral Efficiency projectile, PELE）对金属薄靶垂直侵彻后的弹体轴向剩余速度，运用平面冲击波理论，对PELE的侵彻机理进行分析。参照平头弹体对靶板的侵彻模型，将PELE侵彻过程中的能量损失划分为以下几个部分：外壳体和内芯撞靶区域对应的环形塞块获得的能量、冲击波作用下弹体的内能增量以及剪切耗能等。然后根据能量守恒原理，得到PELE垂直侵彻金属薄靶后的PELE弹体轴向剩余速度的理论模型。为了验证该模型的合理性和准确性，设计相应的试验进行验证。结果表明，不同条件下得到的试验结果和理论模型得到的计算结果均吻合得较好。因此，得到的PELE垂直侵彻薄靶的轴向剩余速度理论模型可为工程应用提供指导和参考。     

Model parameter estimation and residual life prediction for a partially observable failing system

We consider a partially observable degrading system subject to condition monitoring and random failure. The system's condition is categorized into one of three states: a healthy state, a warning state, and a failure state. Only the failure state is observable. While the system is operational, vector data that is stochastically related to the system state is obtained through condition monitoring at regular sampling epochs. The state process evolution follows a hidden semi‐Markov model (HSMM) and Erlang distribution is used for modeling the system's sojourn time in each of its operational states. The Expectation‐maximization (EM) algorithm is applied to estimate the state and observation parameters of the HSMM. Explicit formulas for several important quantities for the system residual life estimation such as the conditional reliability function and the mean residual life are derived in terms of the posterior probability that the system is in the warning state. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the applicability of the estimation procedure and failure prediction method. A comparison results with hidden Markov modeling are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 62: 190–205, 2015     

基于χ~2检验的惯性/卫星紧耦合系统故障检测与隔离方法

研究了一种基于χ~2检验的惯性/卫星紧耦合系统故障检测与隔离方法,该方法可利用故障检测函数自动识别单个卫导故障,并实时剔除故障星重构观测信息序列,从而避免了对紧耦合系统的影响。构建数字化仿真环境对所研究的故障检测与隔离方法进行了仿真,仿真结果表明,该方法可在卫星发生故障时及时检测并隔离故障星,并自动实现观测信息重构,保证了紧耦合系统的精度和完好性。     

通用装备维修保障资源需求仿真建模研究

从新型通用装备维修保障的实际需求出发,在对维修保障系统运行过程分析的基础上,建立了维修资源需求的仿真模型,并给出了相关算法。该模型可实现对各种主要维修资源需求的预测,并能给出装备完好率、备件缺货率和装备待修时间等系统特征指标。该模型和算法可为装备的维修保障提供科学的依据。     

A model to predict the residual life of aircraft engines based upon oil analysis data

This paper reports on a study using the available oil monitoring information, such as the data obtained using the Spectrometric Oil Analysis Programme (SOAP), to predict the residual life of a set of aircraft engines. The relationship between oil monitoring information and the residual life is established using the concept of the proportional residual, which states that the predicted residual life may be proportional to the wear increment measured by the oil analysis programmes. Assuming such a relationship between wear and the residual life exists, we formulated a recursive prediction model for the item's residual life given measured oil monitoring information to date. A set of censored life data of 30 aircraft engines (right censored due to preventive overhaul) along with the history of their monitored metal concentration information are available to us. The metal concentration information includes many variables, such as Fe, Cu, Al, etc.; not all of them are useful, and some of them may be correlated. The principal component analysis (PCA) has been adopted to reduce the dimension of the original data set and to produce a new set of uncorrelated variables, which we shall use in the prediction model. The procedure associated with estimating model parameters is discussed. The model is fitted to the actual SOAP data from the aircraft engines, and the goodness‐of‐fit test has been carried out. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005.     

A general approach to the shape of failure rate and MRL functions

Failure rate and mean residual life are two important characteristics for studying reliability of products. In literature, some work studied the shape of failure rate function based on the knowledge of the associated probability density function; some other work investigated the shape of mean residual life function based on the shape of the associated failure rate function separately for continuous case and discrete case. In this article, a general approach is developed which can be applied to the aforementioned studies. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2004