Acceleration of Service Life Testing by Using Weibull Distribution on Fiber Optical Connectors

The service life assessment of previous fatigue stress has a fundamental role in estimating the reliability of products like fiber optical connectors, and should replicate use in severe environments in telecommunications systems. However, the vibration prediction models used in the literature present limitations in vibration life prediction. In this paper, we propose using the insertion loss fatigue life and including it in the Weibull distribution to determine the Weibull parameters eta and beta to evaluate fiber optic connector reliability R(t) under environmental and mechanical testing stress. We analyzed the failure data of a standard telecommunication fiber optical connector under a program of service life stress testing against that of a fiber optical connector under only mechanical vibration stress testing. The fiber connectors were monitored during the vibration testing to review the transient change of the optical signal. Their results showed that the reliability of the fiber connectors submitted to the service life program was R(t)=0.694, while that of the fiber connectors submitted to mechanical vibration only was R(t)=0.970. In addition, the analysis showed that the service life testing consumed 70.2% of the product's lifetime. We present in Numerical Validation the steps to determine the acceleration factors of the vibration test developed.