Reliability, Life Testing and the Prediction of Service Lives: For Engineers and Scientists (Springer Series in Statistics) - Hardcover

Saunders, Sam C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0387325220 ISBN 13: 9780387325224

Publisher: Springer, 2007

Synopsis

This book is intended for students and practitioners who have had a calculus-based statistics course and who have an interest in safety considerations such as reliability, strength, and duration-of-load or service life. Many persons studying statistical science will be employed professionally where the problems encountered are obscure, what should be analyzed is not clear, the appropriate assumptions are equivocal, and data are scant. In this book there is no disclosure with many of the data sets what type of investigation should be made or what assumptions are to be used.

About this title

From the Back Cover

This book is intended for students and practitioners who have had a calculus-based statistics course and who have an interest in safety considerations such as reliability, strength, and duration-of-load or service life. Many persons studying statistical science will be employed professionally where the problems encountered are obscure, what should be analyzed is not clear, the appropriate assumptions are equivocal, and data are scant. Yet tutorial problems of this nature are virtually never encountered in coursework. In this book there is no disclosure with many of the data sets what type of investigation should be made or what assumptions are to be used.

Most reliability practitioners will be employed where personal interaction between disciplines is a necessity. A section is included on communication skills to facilitate model selection and formulation based on verifiable assumptions, rather than favorable conclusions. However, whether the answer is "right" can never be ascertained.

Past and current applications of stochastic modeling to life-length can only be a guide for future adaptations under different conditions, with new materials in unknown usages. This book unifies the study of cumulative-damage distributions, namely, Wald and Tweedie (i.e., inverse-Gaussian and its reciprocal) with "fatigue-life." These distributions are most useful when the coefficient-of-variation is more appropriate than is the variance as a measure of dispersion. It is shown, uniquely, that the same hyperbolic-sine transformation of each life length variate has a Chi-square one-df distribution. This property is useful in the sample statistics. These IHRA distributions realistically model life-length, strength or duration of load under linear cumulative damage and can be combined as approximations in non-linear situations.

Sam C. Saunders has served as a research engineer for 17 years at the Boeing Scientific Research Laboratories, 20 years as a consultant to the Advisory Committee for Nuclear Safeguards, 10 years as a consultant to NIST, was a principal in the consulting firms Mathematical Analysis Research Corporation and Scientific Consulting Service; and was for 26 years a professor of Applied Mathematics/Statistics at Washington State University. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a former editor of Technometrics.

Review

From the reviews:

"The book authored by one of the most distinguished scientists in the area of reliability theory ... . It is a highly recommendable state-of-the-art description of the field. ... Essentially the book is a collection of chapters summarizing the state of the art in reliability. ... The book is an excellent introduction into the reliability theory. ... I recommend this book strongly ... ." (Goetz Uebe, Advances in Statistical Analysis, Vol. 91 (4), 2007)

"This text is aimed at graduate scientists and engineers and intends to provide a theoretical underpinning to modelling reliability and the analysis of life data. ... the majority of the book concerns the mathematical development of the area that requires a background in probability and mathematical statistics including measures." (Peter Watts Jones, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1120 (22), 2007)

"This book addresses ‘theoretical’, meaning mathematical and statistical, aspects of reliability and failure time analysis. The presentation is ... idiosyncratic in its topic selection and ordering of material. ... It does, however, offer valuable insights and ... thought-provoking material. ... The book also has a great many quotes from notables ... . These are entertaining and educational ... . Overall, I enjoyed this book and recommend it to anyone interested in statistics for reliability and, more broadly, engineering science." (Jerry F. Lawless, International Statistical Review, Vol. 75 (2), 2007)

"This book reviews in an elegant and practical framework some of the main mathematical concepts and results of the modern theory of reliability. The author takes care to explain the intuitive value of and to comment on the practical importance of the mathematical models. It seems ... to offer available mathematical information in order to teach the reader to be competent to make valid service-life predictions. ... The reading of the book is pleasant. The author evidences considerable erudition and great experience in the field." (Eugen Paltanea, Mathematical Reviews, Issue 2008 h)

"This book gives detailed and technical presentations of a broad array of reliability models and methods. ... the book is likely better suited as a reference book or graduate-level textbook. ... Overall, this book is a valuable collection of mathematical and probability methods for studying a variety of reliability and service-life models. With it, the reader will be able to build a solid foundation for the theoretical aspects of this interesting and increasingly important topic." (Christine M. Anderson-Cook, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 103 (482), June, 2008)

“The book is intended for engineers and scientists, and the author provides a review section on the essentials of probability and statistics to facilitate their reading. ... this is a nice book. It engages the reader, has a reasonably good coverage of the standard material in reliability, and is a valuable source of reference for mathematical technologies relevant to reliability. ... it will remain handy on my bookshelf for amusement, inspiration, and enlightenment.” (Nozer D. Singpurwalla, SIAM Review, Vol. 52 (1), 2010)

Edition details

• Publisher: Springer
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0387325220
• ISBN 13: 9780387325224
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 322