• International Journal of Reliability and Applications
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.85-98
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• 2014

Accelerated life testing (ALT) is a well famous technique in life testing and reliability studies, this is particularly used to induce so high stress leading to failure of the highly reliable units quickly under stipulated duration of time. The step-stress ALT is one of the systematic experimental strategy of ALT applied to fail the units in steps. In this article we focus on two important issues (i) necessity of life tests at higher steps with relevant causes (ii) to develop a new optimum test plan for 3-step SSALT under the modified cumulative exposure model proposed by Khamis and Higgins (1998). It is assumed that the lifetime of test units follows Rayleigh distribution and its scale parameter at constant stress level is assumed to be a log-linear function of the stress. The maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters involved in the step-stress ALT model are obtained. A simulation study is performed for numerical investigation of the proposed new optimum plan 3-step, step-stress ALT. The necessity of the life test units at 3-step step-stress is also numerically examined in comparison to simple step-stress setup.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.389-406
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• 2014

Optimal sensor placement techniques play a significant role in enhancing the quality of modal data during the vibration based health monitoring of civil structures, where many degrees of freedom are available despite a limited number of sensors. The literature has shown a shift in the trends for solving such problems, from expansion or elimination approach to the employment of heuristic algorithms. Although these heuristic algorithms are capable of providing a global optimal solution, their greatest drawback is the requirement of high computational effort. Because a highly efficient optimisation method is crucial for better accuracy and wider use, this paper presents an improved simulated annealing (SA) algorithm to solve the sensor placement problem. The algorithm is developed based on the sensor locations' coordinate system to allow for the searching in additional dimensions and to increase SA's random search performance while minimising the computation efforts. The proposed method is tested on a numerical slab model that consists of two hundred sensor location candidates using three types of objective functions; the determinant of the Fisher information matrix (FIM), modal assurance criterion (MAC), and mean square error (MSE) of mode shapes. Detailed study on the effects of the sensor numbers and cooling factors on the performance of the algorithm are also investigated. The results indicate that the proposed method outperforms conventional SA and Genetic Algorithm (GA) in the search for optimal sensor placement.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.4 no.5
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• pp.629-640
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• 2008

A new algorithm is proposed to determine optimal accelerometer locations (OAL) when a structure is identified by frequency domain system identification (SI) method. As a result, a guideline is presented for selecting OAL which can reflect modal response of a structure properly. The guideline is to provide a minimum number of necessary accelerometers with the variation in the number of measurable target modes. To determine OAL for SI applications effectively, the modal sensitivity effective independence distribution vector (MS-EIDV) is developed with the likelihood function of measurements. By maximizing the likelihood of the occurrence of the measurements relative to the predictions, Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) is derived as a function of mode shape sensitivity. This paper also proposes a statistical approach in determining the structural parameters with a presumed parameter error which reflects the epistemic paradox between the determination of OAL and the application of a SI scheme. Numerical simulations have been carried out to examine the proposed OAL algorithm. A two-span multi-girder bridge and a two-span truss bridge were used for the simulation studies. To overcome a rank deficiency frequently occurred in inverting a FIM, the singular value decomposition scheme has been applied.

• International Journal of Reliability and Applications
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.19-35
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• 2012

This paper presents an optimum design of step-stress partially accelerated life test (PALT) plan which allows the test condition to be changed from use to accelerated condition on the occurrence of fixed number of failures. Various life distribution models such as exponential, Weibull, log-logistic, Burr type-Xii, etc have been used in the literature to analyze the PALT data. The need of different life distribution models is necessitated as in the presence of a limited source of data as typically occurs with modern devices having high reliability, the use of correct life distribution model helps in preventing the choice of unnecessary and expensive planned replacements. Truncated distributions arise when sample selection is not possible in some sub-region of sample space. In this paper it is assumed that the lifetimes of the items follow Truncated Logistic distribution truncated at point zero since time to failure of an item cannot be negative. Optimum step-stress PALT plan that finds the optimal proportion of units failed at normal use condition is determined by using the D-optimality criterion. The method developed has been explained using a numerical example. Sensitivity analysis and comparative study have also been carried out.