Engineering teams must ensure products are reliable, but turning raw test and operational data into actionable insights remains a major hurdle. Data is often incomplete or siloed across departments, and modern products exhibit complex, interconnected failure modes that are difficult to predict.
For long-lifecycle products, waiting for failures under normal use is impractical. Accelerated Life Testing (ALT) solves the time constraint, but introduces severe risks without the right approach:
Flawed Models: Testing without understanding the underlying Physics of Failure (PoF) leads to inaccurate predictions and misguided design choices.
The Reality Gap: Without a unified data strategy, connecting lab results to real-world field performance is a constant struggle.
The result? High-risk late-stage failures and unpredictable warranty claims.
HBK provides an integrated ecosystem that bridges the gap between physical testing and statistical reliability analysis. The process allows engineers to move from reactive failure analysis to proactive reliability engineering:
Gather High-Fidelity Life Data: Collect accurate data on product lifetimes from various sources, including laboratory tests (complete data), ongoing tests where failures have not yet occurred (censored data), and historical field returns.
Analyse and Model Failure Data: Use the ReliaSoft software suite to fit the collected data to the appropriate statistical distribution (e.g., Weibull, Lognormal). This process models the failure characteristics of a component or system.
Predict, Forecast, and Optimise: With a validated model, engineers can predict the reliability of an entire product population, forecast warranty returns with confidence, and perform "what-if" analyses to optimise designs, maintenance schedules, and warranty policies.
HBK supports the entire Design for Reliability (DfR) workflow, from physical data capture with high-fidelity sensors and DAQ systems to durability analysis with nCode and system-level modelling with ReliaSoft.
The core of this offering is the ReliaSoft software suite, the industry-standard toolkit for reliability engineers. It provides a unified platform for turning raw data into critical reliability metrics.
Life Data Analysis (or Weibull Analysis) is the broader discipline of modelling the lifetimes of a product population based on a sample of life data. Warranty Analysis is a specific application of life data analysis that uses historical sales and returns data to forecast future warranty claims and associated costs.
Simple statistics often fail to account for "censored data"—units that have not yet failed. Reliability analysis software like Weibull++ is specifically designed to handle censored data correctly, providing a much more accurate picture of a product's true reliability and lifetime characteristics.
The key is to use a life-stress model based on the product's underlying Physics of Failure (PoF). For example, the Arrhenius model is used for temperature-related failures, while the Inverse Power Law model is used for non-thermal stresses like voltage or vibration. ReliaSoft ALTA is built around these principles, guiding you to create valid tests and avoid introducing unrealistic failure modes.
While more data is always better, life data analysis can provide valuable insights even with a small number of failures. The software helps quantify the confidence in your results, so you can make decisions appropriate to the level of uncertainty in your data.
This will bring together HBM, Brüel & Kjær, nCode, ReliaSoft, MicroStrain and Discom brands, helping you innovate faster for a cleaner, healthier, and more productive world.
