Redundancy and Reliability of Air to Air Missile Fuze Electronics

Achieving a high level of reliability is of utmost importance in military applications. A given military grade part is extremely more expensive than its commercial counterpart. This great price difference is mainly due to the differences in design, manufacturing and the quality of parts used in commercial versus military products. Moreover, design of military grade products is much more difficult than commercial or industrial grade products mainly due to the fact that extremely difficult operating environments are expected for military products for which they must be designed, tested and qualified. The achievement of a high level of reliability in military products is also partly due to especial design considerations such as derating of parts, use of high reliability parts, and designing in reliability by the use of redundancy. In this paper, the analysis and design of military products and the ways to increase their reliability are addressed. The specific characteristics of military grade products, the various approaches to designing in reliability and the importance of redundancy especially in military systems are discussed. In this study, the failure rate and mean time to failure of air to air missile fuze electronics that incorporates redundancy are calculated based on MIL-HDBK-217F. [Journal of American Science 2010;6(2):147-154]. (ISSN: 1545-1003).