<FONT face=Verdana>Reliability of Traveling Wave Tubes (TWTs) are crucial for operation of many armaments. However
due to the complexity and expensiveness of TWTs
the way to precisely evaluate their reliability under small sample size is still the problem to face. In this way
prior information
such as expert experience and historical data
can be used to enhance the estimation precisions. With a fuzzy prior distribution construction method for TWTs introduced
based on fuzzy membership functions
prior information can be effectively merged with test data using Bayes method. Reliability evaluation for some satellite TWTs shows that
the precision can be enhanced notably for data with small samples or high truncation levels by using Bayes estimation with normal fuzzy prior distributions. And the estimation can be modified by increasing test information. Furthermore
the bandwidth of the normal priors can be used to adjust the proportion of prior information within the post-Bayes distributions.