Bathtub Curve and MTBF
A site dedicated to data-driven reliability decisions
A Real-World Bathtub Curve
MTBF is a reliability metric, especially for products or systems exhibiting failures in a shape of a bathtub curve. Information on MTBFs supports decision making for engineering development and service operations in management and planning.
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A bathtub curve generally represents three phases of product failures, including an early phase, a normal service life phase, and a wear-out phase. For a real product, we may or may not observe all three phases. For an MTBF estimation purpose, we expect a constant failure rate during a product's service period.
1. Field return data fit in a bathtub curve
This is an example of how a set of real field return data look like after being processed and presented in a failure rate plot. It can be observed that the data fit a bathtub curve showing an early and then a constant failure rate phase of the product in this example.
​If you need to know whether your products, systems or assets in operation also exhibit a bathtub failure behavior, or if you simply need MTBF info to be extracted from field data for some reason, we can help, We provide a free service for a preliminary analysis. You can click here to contact us.
​A Real-World Bathtub Curve:
1.Field return data fit in a bathtub curve
2.The original data
3.Identified early failures
4.MTBF
5.Reliability growth