Certified Reliability Engineer Practice Test

The infant mortality phase is characterized by a high likelihood of initial failures that occur shortly after a product is introduced or put into service. This phase represents the early life of a product where defects and issues may be uncovered due to manufacturing problems, design flaws, or inadequate quality control measures.

During this phase, customers might notice reliability issues as products fail to perform as expected, often due to factors that were not identified during the testing and development stages. Understanding this phase is essential for reliability engineers, as it highlights the importance of rigorous testing and quality assurance practices to identify and eliminate potential failure modes before a product reaches the market.

In contrast, other phases of the bathtub curve, such as the normal life phase, represent a period of steady, random failures; the wear-out phase indicates failures that occur after a product has been in use for a significant period, often due to aging or degradation; and the design phase is focused on conceptualization and development, where reliability concerns are anticipated but not yet realized in operational failures.