A New Approach to Finding a Risk-Informed Safety Factor for “Fail-Safe” Pressure Vessel and Piping Design

The purpose of this paper is to present a new approach to finding a risk-informed safety factor for the “fail-safe” design of a high-consequence engineering system. The new approach is based on the assumption of a 99.99 % confidence level and a 99.99 % coverage, and the application of the classical theory of tolerance limits, error propagation, and a method of statistical model parameter estimation known as the bootstrap method. To illustrate this new approach, we first apply the methodology to the UTS data of six materials ranging from glass, ceramics, to a high-strength steel at both 20 C and 600 C, and then to the fatigue life estimation of a BK-7 glass using two available additional sets of laboratory test data. Significance and limitations of our new approach to the “fail-safe” UTS design and fatigue life prediction of an aging PVP or aircraft are presented and discussed.

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