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Introduction
At the start of the 21st century, the world and business have never been tied as closely together as they have with the emergence of the world market and global economy. The global economy has created a need for business and corporations to adapt to the new competition and higher customer expectation levels coming from anywhere across the globe. In order to respond to the increasing competition, get products to the global market in the shortest possible time, and satisfy the demanding customer expectations, businesses and corporations are turning to more sophisticated methods and techniques of testing. Many of today's products are capable of operating under extreme environmental conditions and operate for thousands of hours without failure with increasing complexity, including the Department of Defense (DoD). The need for testing and evaluation in the aerospace/defense industry is to ensure the reliability and design of past, current, and future weapon systems in order to guarantee functionality and reliability of these systems during operational use. Stringent requirements by the DoD and other military branches are required to ensure system life and system reliability over extended periods of time (40-50 years) for these types of products. The testing of subsystems and systems is a very expensive and time consuming process but a necessary part of the validation process for the designed system. There are many different types of tests available that are suited to provide design validation and reliability results; however the goal is to minimize the cost of these types of test in order to accelerate product development time while minimizing expensive engineering changes of operational products and product unreliability.
One of the new testing methods now being employed by the DoD is accelerated testing. Accelerated testing is a method for obtaining more information about the product, reliability, and design from a specified test time than during normal operational life testing parameters. Accelerated testing is performed in environments and conditions that are more severe than that experienced during normal system operation in order to induce latent defects and to make predictable life calculations. This type of testing allows the commercial industry, and now the aerospace and defense contractors, to get products in to the market sooner, reduce warranty costs, improve product reliability and performance, and...