What is the shape of a bundle? An analysis of Rosen's fibrous composites experiments using the chain-of-bundles model

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-1-2019

Abstract

In the 1960s, W. B. Rosen conducted some remarkable experiments on unidirectional fibrous composites that gave seminal insights into their failure under increasing tensile load. These insights led him to a grid system where the nodes in the grid were ineffective length fibers and to model the composite as something he called a chain-of-bundles model (i.e., a series system of parallel subsystems of horizontal nodes that he referred to as bundles), where the chain fails when one of the bundles fails. A load-sharing rule was used to quantify how the load is borne among the nodes. Here, Rosen's experiments are analyzed to determine the shape of a bundle. The analysis suggests that the bundles are not horizontal collection of nodes but rather small rectangular grid systems of nodes where the load-sharing between nodes is local in its form. In addition, a Gibbs measure representation for the joint distribution of binary random variables is given. This is used to show how the system reliability for a reliability structure can be obtained from the partition function for the Gibbs measure and to illustrate how to assess the risk of failure of a bundle in the chain-of-bundle model.

Publication Title

Scandinavian Journal of Statistics

Volume

46

Issue

1

First Page

59

Last Page

86

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1111/sjos.12338

ISSN

03036898

E-ISSN

14679469

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS