Reducing Degradation Testing Time With Tightened Critical Value

In the era of speed, time to market becomes the most important factor of competitiveness. Therefore, shortening development lead time is crucial for every manufacturing company to achieve successful launching of new products. Developing a product consists of two major activities; design and evaluation. For efficient design, many innovation procedures and tools are provided such as concurrent engineering, product data management and CAD/CAM. However, relatively little emphasis was placed to reducing evaluation time. To reduce the evaluation time of new products, accelerated tests are usually considered. Accelerated test is to get life information of products quickly by shortening the life or hastening the degradation of their performance. ALT (accelerated life test) is considered as the typical accelerated test. However, in ALT, there are some cases difficult to get failure time information, especially for the products with high reliability. For those cases, ADT (accelerated degradation test) is considered as a good substitutable alternative. In ADT, the values of performance characteristics are measured at