Lumen degradation modeling of white-light LEDs in step stress accelerated degradation test

•A methodology for SSADT modeling was presented based on the modified Wiener process.•A new estimator was proposed to improve the parameter accuracy.•Experiment results show that the SSADT can be used as an alternative instead of CSADT.

In this paper, lumen degradation is described by using a modified Brownian motion process for mid-power white-light LED packages, which were aged under step stress accelerated degradation test (SSADT). First, a SSADT model has been established based on the theory of equivalent accumulative damage. Then, a method was proposed to improve the accuracy of the parameter estimation by carefully modifying the estimator, which was proposed in the previous research. Experimental data show that parameters estimated by using SSADT model are very close to those estimated by using constant stress accelerated degradation test (CSADT) model, indicating the feasibility of the SSADT model. The experiment also indicates that SSADT can be used as an alternative to CSADT, as it enables comparable estimation accuracy, while using less testing time, a smaller sample size and less test capacity.