A physics-based reliability method for components adopted in new series systems

New system development may not require designing all components; existing components can be used. Although the reliability of each component may be available, it is still difficult to accurately predict the system reliability in the early design stage. The system designers may not access all details of component design to consider components dependencies. This work attempts to explore the feasibility of addressing this issue. A physics-based reliability method is developed from both perspectives of component designers and system designers. For the component design, the relationship between the component reliability and the common load of the system is provided through the physics-based reliability analysis. On the other hand, from the perspective of the new system designers, they could use the information about component reliabilities to rebuild component limit-state functions, which will then lead to an accurate prediction of the system reliability. The results show that it is possible to accurately predict series system reliability without revealing the proprietary information of component suppliers who design and manufacture the components independently.