A General Degradation Process of Useful Life Analysis Under Unreliable Signals for Accelerated Degradation Testing

In order to achieve fault diagnosis and prognosis, one needs a sufficient and valid life-cycle data. However, this requirement is difficult for current high-reliable manufacturing system. Good thing is that the technique of accelerated degradation testing can be used to address this issue. Bad thing is that it needs a reliable testing/measuring technique to build an accurate model for accelerated degradation testing. However, in practical applications, data acquisition is obtained by sensors or measurement devices, which cannot guarantee perfect working condition under the influence of external environment and stresses, resulting in unreliable signals. Furthermore, since traditional models require complex differentiation and cannot obtain analytical expressions when considering unreliable signals, traditional models rarely reflect well this situation. Motivated by these facts, an accurate model for the accelerated degradation testing is proposed in this study with considering the unreliable signals. Based on the proposed model, a closed-form expression for the useful life analysis is derived. The Metropolis–Hastings (M-H) sampling method is used to estimate the unknown parameters used in the proposed model. For illustration, the electrical connector dataset is analyzed with the proposed model and the traditional models. Comparing the obtained results, the proposed model is more accurate in the useful life analysis than the traditional accelerated degradation testing models by considering the unreliable signals.