Storage reliability prediction of electromechanical components based on virtual manufacturing and testing

Electromechanical components (EMCs) such as relays and contactors have been used extensively in industrial and military areas. The storage reliability of these EMCs has a direct impact on the reliability of the system that contains them. However, during the design phase, it is difficult to predict the storage reliability of EMCs because of few failure rate data of parts, as well as limited testing time and budgets. To address these problems, a virtual Manufacturing and testing method is proposed in this paper, so as to simulate the storage degradation process of batch EMCs. By considering the influence of the quality screening process in the manufacturing process, as well as the unit-to-unit variability of EMCs on the storage degradation paths and the overall life distribution of batch products, the storage failure distribution function is obtained, based on Wiener process. At the same time, the distribution of the diffusion coefficient in the degradation model and the failure distribution model is quantified by introducing testing data of related products as priori information, so as to reflect the uncertainty of the storage degradation process of EMCs. A case study of an electromagnetic relay is carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.