Statistical Fatigue Models: A Survey

This paper attempts to bring together some of the well known and some of the lesser known probability distributions that are candidates for failure models in reliability studies. Each probability distribution is discussed in the light of a physical process that gives rise to it and as such provides a better insight to its potential user. Alternately, a user faced with the task of choosing a failure distribution can direct his choice by determining which of the physical causes discussed here best fits into his situation. The results presented in this paper, some of them very recent, have appeared in the literature, but in a scattered form. To the knowledge of this author, there is no single source of literature that presents all the failure distributions in a comprehensive form. This presentation will enable the reliability analyst to view failure distributions in a more complete context.