Safety Factors and Reliability: Friends or Foes?

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

   PDF

2. Prologue

   • Isaac Elishakoff

   Pages 1-11

3. Reliability of Structures

   • Isaac Elishakoff

   Pages 12-46

4. Safety Factors and Reliability: Random Actual Stress & Deterministic Yield Stress

   • Isaac Elishakoff

   Pages 47-74

5. Safety Factors and Reliability: Deterministic Actual Stress & Random Yield Stress

   • Isaac Elishakoff

   Pages 75-96

6. Safety Factor and Reliability: Both Actual Stress and Yield Stress Are Random

   • Isaac Elishakoff

   Pages 97-117

7. Non-Probabilistic Factor of Safety

   • Isaac Elishakoff

   Pages 118-144

8. Stochastic Safety Factor by Birger and Maymon

   • Isaac Elishakoff

   Pages 145-152

9. Safety Factor in Light of the Bienaymé-Markov and Chebychev Inequalities

   • Isaac Elishakoff

   Pages 153-174

10. Japanese Contributions to the Interrelating Safety Factor and Reliability

    • Isaac Elishakoff

    Pages 175-195

11. Epilogue

    • Isaac Elishakoff

    Pages 196-203

12. Back Matter

    Pages 204-295

    PDF

Have you ever wondered where the safety factors come from? Why is it that deterministic analysis has reached a very sophisticated level, but in the end empirical factors are still needed? Is there a way to select them, rather than assigning them arbitrarily as is often done?
This book clearly shows that safety factors are closely related with the reliability of structures, giving yet another demonstration of Albert Einstein's maxim that "It is incomprehensible that Nature is comprehensible". The book shows that the safety factors are much more comprehensible if they are seen in a probabilistic context. Several definitions of the safety factors are given, analytical results on insightful numbers are presented, nonprobabilistic safety factors are shown, as well as their estimates derived by the inequalities of Bienayme, Markov, Chebushev and Camp-Meidell. A special chapter is devoted to important contributions by Japanese experts.
This volume will help to critically re-think the issue of safety factors, which can create a false feeling of security. The deterministic paradigm can be enhanced by incorporating probabilistic concepts wisely where they are needed without treating all variables as probabilistic ones. The book shows that there is a need of their integration rather than separation.
This book is intended for engineers, graduate students, lecturers and researchers.

• beam
• modeling
• stress
• structure
• uncertainty

• Department of Mechanical Engineering, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, USA

  Isaac Elishakoff

Policies and ethics