Reliability Bounds and Critical Time for the BirnbauMSaunders Distribution

The BirnbauMSaunders distribution, under certain conditions, can be used to model the fatigue failure-time caused by catastrophic crack size. This paper obtains: • reliability bounds for the BirnbauMSaunders distribution, • point & interval estimates for the critical time of the failure (hazard)-rate. The confidence intervals are constructed under the assumption that both parameters are unknown. This method is not affected by censoring, as long as confidence intervals for the parameters can be established. Numerical examples illustrate the procedure.