Irregular Time‐Varying Stress Degradation Path Modeling: a Case Study on Lithium‐ion Cell Degradation

The aim of this paper is to investigate the issue of degradation modeling and reliability assessment for products under irregular time‐varying stresses. Conventional degradation models have been extensively used in the relevant literature to characterize degradation processes under deterministic stresses. However, the time‐varying stress, which may affect degradation processes, widely exists in field conditions. This paper extends the general degradation‐path model by considering the effects of time‐varying stresses. The new degradation‐path model captures influences of varying stresses on performance characteristics. A nonlinear least square method is used to estimate the unknown parameters of the proposed model. A bootstrap algorithm is adopted for computing the confidence intervals of the mean time to failure and percentiles of the failure‐time distribution. Finally, a case study of lithium‐ion cells is presented to validate the proposed method. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.