Some Censoring Issues Regarding the Reliability of Load-Sharing Systems

• Activity Number: 463
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 4, 2010 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Nonparametric Statistics
• Author(s): James Lynch*+ and John M. Grego and Shuang Li and Jayaram Sethuraman
• Companies: University of South Carolina and University of South Carolina and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Florida State University
• Keywords: partition based priors ; censoring ; load sharing systems ; reliability

Abstract

The motivation for this talk is the analysis of data from a famous experiment in the 1960's by B. W. Rosen on unidirectional fibrous composites under increasing tensile load. Such composites can be modeled as load sharing systems where a fiber segment failure causes load transfer to adjacent segments that can initiate a cascade pattern of instantaneous fiber segment failures (multiple event failures). The data consists of a series of pictures where the failures of segments are indicated and where bounds on the fiber segment breaking strengths can be determined (interval censoring) if the pattern of failures is known. This pattern, though, is censored for several failures in Rosen's experiment. The point of the talk is to illustrate how a modification of the recent work of Sethuraman and Hollander (2009, JSPI) on partition based priors can be used to analyze this data.