Reliability analysis for systems with self-healing mechanism in degradation-shock dependence processes with changing degradation rate

We consider a system subject to two distinct failure modes, i.e., a soft failure subject to gradual degradation, and a hard failure caused by cumulative shocks, whichever comes first. This type of systems has wide applications and has been extensively studied in the literature. However, little attention has been paid to the dynamic self-healing mechanism in such systems. With the emergence of intelligent systems and complex architectures, materials with intrinsic self-healing mechanism have the ability to recover damage under external random shocks. In order to illustrate practical significance of the proposed model, reinforced concrete beams (RC-beam) with self-healing capsules in dependent competing failure processes due to cumulative crack evolution effect and rebar performance degradation are taken as the application background. In this paper, the change of degradation rates and damage evolution effect are considered based on the design of critical failure threshold and self-healing mechanism. This study proposes a novel reliability model for a system experiencing dependent competing degradation and cumulative shock failure in a dynamic self-healing environment. A procedure is developed to evaluate the reliability based on this model. We demonstrate the fitness of proposed model through numerical simulation and sensitivity analysis.