Burn-in Period and Early Failures

Many components have a "bathtub" shaped failure distribution, where a proportion of those components fail early in their service life, and the failure rate then drops to a very low level until reaching a second distribution later in the component's service life. These "bathtub" shaped failure distributions can be modeled in GoldSim using a combination of two or more failure modes.

In this case, two failure modes will be used. The burn-in period (representing initial failures) is modeled using the defective component failure mode. In this case, 25% of components are affected by this mode, and they fail according to an exponential distribution with a failure rate of 2 times/yr. The second failure mode is a Normal failure mode, with mean 8 years and a standard deviation of 1.3 years.

To Open the Model File:

1. Start GoldSim
2. Click on the File and select Open Example...
3. Browse to Reliability Examples
4. Select the file called BurnInPeriod.gsm