ASYMPTOTIC TIME TO FAILURE OF A MECHANICAL SYSTEM OF PARALLEL MEMBERS

System of parallel members subjected to tension loads is investigated. A mechanical system of parallel members differs from the usual parallel element model studied in reliability monographs in that the nonfailed members at any instant must share an applied system load according to some rule. The resulting dependence among members causes difficulty in deriving useful exact results. However under certain reasonable probabilistic assumptions regarding single member failure, system loading and member load sharing, it can be shown that the system failure time is asymptotically normally distributed as the number of members grows large.