A Novel Reliability Analysis Method for Turbine Discs with the Mixture of Fuzzy and Probability-Box Variables

Abstract

Abstract Fuzzy and probability-box (p-box) variables exit widely in aerospace engineering. To evaluate the reliability of turbine discs under the mixture of these two types of variables and guarantee safety, the critical point lies in how to deal with the fuzzy variables. In this paper, a novel method based on equivalent transformation of entropy and saddlepoint approximation (SPA) is proposed to estimate the reliability of turbine discs with the mixture of fuzzy and p-box variables. The advantage of the proposed method is that it can transform fuzzy variables whose memberships are non-normal into normal random variables through entropy invariability; meanwhile, using the SPA, the required sample size and corresponding computational cost decreases greatly. An example is used to illustrate the proposed method and a comparison is also made with the interval Monte Carlo simulation (IMCS). The results indicate that the proposed method is promising and has higher efficiency with almost the same accuracy.