A novel solution for comprehensive competing failure process considering two-phase degradation and non-Poisson shock

With the complexity of operating environment and working mechanism growing, the competing process between soft failure and hard failure has become a key issue in both theoretical and practical engineering study. Particularly, the dependence of two failure modes and the shock arrival time randomness have been increasingly highlighted. In this paper, a novel two-phase competing failure analysis method considering zoned shock effects and complicatedly distributed shock arrival time is proposed, where both shock and degradation can result in phase changing. The zoned shock effects are established by considering the zoned proportional relations between shock and its damage. Meanwhile, the complexity of shock arrival time is discussed and a Phase-Type based model is constructed accordingly. More importantly, to illustrate a better understanding, the investigation of the proposed model follows a two-step procedure (from the simple to the complex) and the analytical reliability solutions are derived for both situations based on a series of meaningful statistical theories. A comprehensive verification study is carried out to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed solution.