Reliability analysis for mechanical components subject to degradation process and random shock with wiener process

Abstract

For mechanical component, there are usually several different processes which can cause the component to failure. In this paper, the reliability modeling is studied for the component which has two kinds of failure processes, i.e., degradation process and random shocks. The Wiener process is used to describe the degradation process, the cumulative effect due to random shock on the degradation process is considered, and the effect of shock is discussed. The parameters of the model are estimated by the maximum likelihood estimation method. A case study of fatigue crack growth is provided to illustrate the proposed model and method. The reliability assessment results are also compared with the method of normal distribution. The results show that considering the impact of shocks can obviously lower the reliability of the system. Thus, the effect that the shocks act on the degradation may not be neglected. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.