An accelerated life test model for solid lubricated bearings based on dependence analysis and proportional hazard effect

•A physical accelerated life test model is built for solid lubricated bearings.•This model uses copula function to describe dependence between subcomponents.•This model also considers proportional hazard effect.•Experimental results show that this model is effective.

Solid lubricated bearings are important mechanical components in space, and accelerated life tests (ALT) of them are widely conducted. ALT model is needed to give the lifetime of solid lubricated bearings with ALT data, and former accelerated life test models of solid lubricated models are mainly statistical models, while physical models can imply an understanding of the failure mechanism and are preferred whenever possible. This paper proposes a physical model, which is called copula dependent proportional hazards model. A solid lubricated bearing is considered as a system consisting of several dependent items and Clayton copula function is used to describe the dependence. Proportional hazard effect is also considered to build the model. An ALT of solid lubricated bearing is carried out and the results show that this model is effective.