Abstract:

Owing to the defect in design and material or the instability of productive process, there are always a certain proportion of defect products in which catastrophic failure occurs with a higher probability in a whole lot of products. In order to eliminate the catastrophic failure products as fully  as possible, it is needed to conduct a burn-in screening test and determine the optimal burn-in time. Besides, the achieved reliability of the whole product can be improved and the life cycle cost can be reduced. Based on the assumption that catastrophic failure time follows an exponential distribution and the performance degradation path can be characterized by a Wiener process, this paper firstly establishes the mixed competing failure model for the products involving catastrophic and degradation failures. Then, the burn-in test optimization model is presented, where the objective function is the mean residual life (MRL), and the numerical solution is derived. Finally, the proposed model is illustrated with a numerical example, and the sensitivity analysis is conducted for the model parameters.