Reliability of Parallel Systems under Imposed Uniform Strain

Abstract

An imposed strain approach is used for the reliability analysis of brittle parallel systems with arbitrary stress‐strain behavior of its components. It leads to a formal description of the failure event as a parallel system. The failure probability of the strongest component overestimates the system failure probability, so that the consideration of the other components can be recommended for which first‐order reliability techniques supply an efficient tool. Numerical comparisons with certain special exact results show that the correlation structure is taken fairly well into account by this first‐order method. Essential improvements result from better estimates of the component reliability. This induces the definition of so called equivalent components, which might also be useful for the evaluation of more general systems. The accuracy of the method appears sufficient for many engineering applications.