Resumen
High reliability is the basic requirement of aerospace pyrotechnic devices. Traditional reliability evaluation methods require a lot of tests, which become too expensive; therefore, the small-sample evaluation method is needed to reduce the cost. Using energy as a performance parameter can better reflect the essence of the function of the pyrotechnic device compared to using force. Firstly, this article assumes that the strength obeys the normal distribution, and the stress is a constant; therefore, the reliability evaluation formula based on the t distribution is proposed. Then, taking the pin puller as the research object, four sets of energy measuring devices were developed so as to obtain its performance parameters. Finally, the evaluation results show that the pin puller has a high reliability of 0.9999999765 with a confidence level of 0.995. The reliability method proposed in this paper is a small-sample method for evaluating aerospace pyrotechnic devices, which can greatly reduce the cost of reliability evaluation. Moreover, the energy measuring devices developed in this paper can provide a new way of measuring performance parameters for piston-type pyrotechnic devices.