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CHAPTER 11

Birnbaum–Saunders
Distribution
11.1 INTRODUCTION
The Birnbaum–Saunders distribution (BSD) was first introduced by Fletcher (1911) [69], and in
a slightly different parametric form by Freudenthal and Shinozuka (1961) [72]. It became popular
with Birnbaum and Saunders (1969) [21], whose work originated from investigations involving
crack-size growth in materials made of metals or alloys caused by cyclic vibrations. Duration of
the cycle can range from a few seconds to hours, days, or even months depending on the field of
application. For example, cracks in buildings and bridges are caused by seismic events (quakes and
aftershocks), which could be rare in some locations. Cracks may appear casually, and advance to
larger sizes randomly by a non-negative amount (called crack extensions), until it culminates in a
critical size. The affected part may pose a threat to safe operation after a discrete number of cycles
N, upon which a fatigue failure occurs either by a dominant crack reaching a critical size or a set of
spatially correlated cracks reaching a threshold level. A crack is considered to be dominant either due
to its size, orientation, or its sensitive location or a combination of them. Hence, even small cracks in
critical or sensitive regions are dominant. Examples are cracks or ruptures on tankers that transport
highly inflammable products or toxic materials, cracks on internal combustion engines, boilers and
storage tanks used in industry, and vacuum-operated machinery, because even a small crack can
have disastrous consequences. Similarly, cracks on medical devices of various sorts could pose health
hazards to operators and patients. It is implicitly assumed that the crack growth during each cycle
(1 : : : N ) is independent, and have the same statistical distribution. It is known as Miner’s Rule in
materials physics, where the critical damage caused by stress levels after n cycles is proportional to
n/N.
There are in general two models called fatigue failure and stochastic wear-out failure (of which
the former is a particular case) depending on the device, part, component, or structure. The fatigue
failure (due to stress, tensions, etc.) under cyclic loadings in manufacturing and transportation sys-
tems can be modeled by BSD,1 from which it gets the name fatigue-life distribution. BSD along
with lognormal, Weibull, and gamma distributions are used in life-time modeling of components

1 This is called the force of mortality in some fields where forces are physical or mechanical.

R. Chattamvelli et al., Continuous Distributions in Engineering and the Applied Sciences – Part II
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
164 11. BIRNBAUM–SAUNDERS DISTRIBUTION
with specified wear. The PDF of two-parameter BSD is
1 1
f .xI ˛; ˇ/ D p .ˇ=x/1=2 .1 C ˇ=x/ exp.1=˛ 2 / expf 2
.x=ˇ C ˇ=x/g; (11.1)
2 2 ˛ˇ 2˛

for x; ˛; ˇ > 0. The CDF or SF can be expressed in terms of standard normal CDF as
p p  p p 
F .xI ˛; ˇ/ D ˆ Œ x=ˇ ˇ=x=˛ ; S.xI ˛; ˇ/ D ˆ Œ ˇ=x x=ˇ=˛ : (11.2)

Differentiate (11.2) wrt x to get the PDF as

p p   p p p 
f .xI ˛; ˇ/ D  Œ x=ˇ ˇ=x=˛  .1=˛/ 1=.2 ˇ x/ C ˇ=.2x 3=2 / : (11.3)
p
Take 2 x as a common factor from the denominator of (11.3) to get
p p h p p i p
f .xI ˛; ˇ/ D  Œ x=ˇ ˇ=x=˛ 1= ˇ C ˇ=x =.2˛ x/: (11.4)

Rearrange to get another form as

p p h i
f .xI ˛; ˇ/ D  Œ x=ˇ ˇ=x=˛ .ˇ=x/1=2 C .ˇ=x/3=2 =.2˛ˇ/: (11.5)

It is denoted by BS.˛; ˇ/ where ˛ is the shape and ˇ is the scale parameter.

11.1.1 DERIVATION OF BSD

Consider a nearly smooth material (made of metals, alloys, fiber, plastics, or concrete) that under-
goes cycles of stress loads continually or periodically (as in vibrations during landing and takeoff of
aircrafts that continuously operate with a break in-between) that results in a cumulative degrada-
tion process on the overall quality. The shape of the material is unimportant to the formulation, but
could be flat or curved surfaces (as in fuselage of aircrafts and submarines, train-tracks, conveyor
belts, tyres, surface of buildings and bridges, blades of turbines; circular as in brake pads, discs of
various sorts; spherical as in ball-bearings; cylindrical as in shafts of rotating machinery, elevator ca-
bles; or a combination of them as in piston pumps, engines, gearboxes, complex joints, crankshafts,
etc.). A clearly demarcated region must also be identified for each crack as in buildings, railway
tracks, boilers, and turbines, where it could appear at multiple locations.
Birnbaum and Saunders (1969) considered the distribution of a nonlinear transformation of
Gaussian variate as p
X D ˇŒ˛Z=2 C .˛Z=2/2 C 12 ; (11.6)
where Z  N(0,1),
p ˛ and ˇ are positive constants (in comparison, the IGD is related to the standard
normal as Y D =X.X= 1/).
The genesis of the fissure or crack differs among various applications, but must be well-
understood because its growth process could differ depending on the context (type of stress like