Reliability and safety aspects of glass as a deep ocean structure

Glass for deep ocean structres can experience local tensile stresses on the surfaces of internal bubbles even though the applied loads are compressive. To insure the safety and reliability of these structures accurate predictions of the probability of a failure originating at an internal flaw are made based on an assumed Weibull distribution of strengths. This analysis includes the effects of size and dissimilarities between the strength distributions of test specimens and the actual structure.