Reliability anaysis and reliability improvement for a missile seeker

Reliability is a significant concept for the efence industry projects which have substantial amount of investment and labor costs. The reliability requirements of defense projects are also the prominent ones among others. Therefore, performing the reliability analysis are widely accepted for the purpose of specifying and improving the system reliabilities since the beginning of any project to optimize the performance of the designs for both system and subsystem levels. Missile reliability analyses are one of the most essential design analyses to meet missile life cycle requirements and they ensure to produce more enduring and high performance products. Hence, it is one of the crucial analyses to perform for a seeker which is the leading sensor to feed missile guidance like any other subsystems. In this thesis, an electronic hardware reliability analysis consisting of reliability modeling, allocation and estimation is performed for a theoretical RF seeker of a missile. Additionally, a reliability improvement which can be used for further life cycle studies is presented. To improve the reliability of the seeker, verified methods in the literature as probabilistic analysis and the periodical test implementation are applied. As a result of the study, a design alternative is proposed to increase seeker reliability.