Lifetime Estimation Based on Accelerated Degradation Data with Application to OLED Reliability Studies

Abstract

Accelerated degradation testing (ADT) expedites product degradation by stressing the product beyond its normal use. To extrapolate the product`s reliability at use condition, the ADT requires a known functional link that relates the harsh testing environment to the normal use environment. In this paper, we propose three methods for estimating lifetime distribution from ADT data where the degradation model is not of the form that explicitly expresses the stress-degradation relationship: delta approximation, multiple imputation of failure-times, and lifetime distribution-based procedure. All the approaches are intuitively appealing because they make inference directly on the lifetime distribution itself. They are also easy to implement, not requiring intensive computation, hence they have potential in wide range of applications to inference problems for the lifetime distribution based on accelerated degradation data. A real-life case study on the ADT of the commercial organic light-emitting diode (OLED) product is provided for the illustration of the proposed methods.