Patent ID: 7831396

Claim:
A method for predicting a life expectancy of a product, having at least two components, as a function of a predefined loading of the product, comprising: acting upon the components of the product by different loadings; operating each component at the different loadings until failure; storing obtained failure times for each component as a function of each of the loadings; recording a corresponding end-of-life (EOL) curve of each component as a function of the load-dependent failure times of the component; ascertaining an EOL curve of the product, so that at each of the different loadings, it includes the EOL curve of a component which has a shortest failure time at the corresponding loading; and determining an anticipated service life of the product as a functional value of the EOL curve of the product as a function of the predefined loading of the product; wherein the components of the product are loaded by at least one of (a) a specific, absolute operating temperature and (b) a temperature fluctuation of a particular amplitude within a specific period of time, and wherein the different loadings are in a number of loading classes, and for each loading class a distance of a duration of a predefined loading of a component to a corresponding value on the EOL curve of the component is determined and summed up according to Palmgren-Miner.