Narrow Results

A methodology for reliability and safety analysis of a certain class of repairable fault-tolerant systems is presented. The analysis leads to a closed-form approximation of the probability of an absorbing state in a state transition diagram. This expression can provide insight into the relationship between various system parameters and system reliability and/or safety. The approximation technique is based on the combination of results from the analysis of several failure mechanisms, each studied by itself, into an expression for the approximate reliability of a system. The resulting approximation error can be analyzed in order to evaluate whether or not the approximation is useful in a given situation.

This paper studies the eigenbuckling of Mindlin plate with two adjacent edges clamped and the remaining edges simply supported or clamped by using the separation of variables method, and the concise and explicit closed-form solutions are obtained for the first time. The cases involving free edges can also be dealt with if there are two opposite edges simply supported. The closed-form solutions are in good agreement with the existing solutions, thus the validity of present method and accuracy of the obtained solutions are verified. This paper proves to be a major development of analytical method since it has long been acknowledged that the eigenbuckling of rectangular plates without two parallel edges simply supported are not amenable to analytical solutions.