AN EMPIRICAL-APPROACH TO OBTAINING BOUNDS ON THE FAILURE PROBABILITY THROUGH STRESS STRENGTH INTERFERENCE

This paper proposes a new empirical approach to computing the unreliability bounds based upon the subinterval probabilities of the stress and strength in the interference region. It is demonstrated by the numerical examples that in most cases the unreliability bounds so obtained not only will include the exact value but also are narrower than the existing ones. The average of the lower and the upper bound is shown to serve as a good point estimate of the unreliability. It is also shown that the approach is practical since the number of subintervals required for an acceptable accuracy is small. In some cases a rather acceptable accuracy is achieved when the number of intervals is around ten.