Joint Accelerated Failure Mode Modeling of Degradation and Traumatic Failure Times

Many products have two kinds of failure modes, that is, degradation failure and traumatic failure. It is of great importance to study the competing failure of degradation failure and traumatic failure at use or accelerating conditions. In this paper, the problem of accelerated failure with competing causes of a degradation failure mode and multiple traumatic failure modes is treated. We discuss the scenario wherein the performance degradation process is described by Brownian motion process, traumatic failure-time follows exponential or Weibull distribution and the possibility of traumatic failure depends on the performance degradation. The accelerated failure model is proposed, method for estimating parameters is given and reliability model is deduced. As a nice application of the proposed model, we finally make the accelerated failure analysis of metallized film pulse capacitors.