On the Probabilistic Distributions of Stress and Strength in Design Problems

This paper presents an approach to obtain the stress and strength density distributions in reliability design problems. The density and cumulative distributions of the stress and strength are obtained in the form of multiple integrals. Linear regression analysis is used to plot estimates of the cumulative distributions on probability paper. The distribution with the minimum error is chosen. A computer program to perform the calculations and to select the appropriate distribution is developed. An example is presented to illustrate the application of the method.