Random and interval variables often coexist. Interval variables make reliability analysis much more computationally intensive. This work develops a new hybrid reliability analysis method so that the probability analysis (PA) loop and interval analysis (IA) loop are decomposed into two separate loops. An efficient PA algorithm is employed, and a new efficient IA method is developed. The new IA method consists of two stages. The first stage is for monotonic limit-state functions. If the limit-state function is not monotonic, the second stage is triggered. In the second stage, the limit-state function is sequentially approximated with a second order form, and the gradient projection method is applied to solve the extreme responses of the limit-state function with respect to the interval variables. The efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method are demonstrated by three examples.

Tooth spalling is one of the most destructive surface failure models of the gear faults. Previous studies have mainly concentrated on the spalling damage of a single gear tooth, but the spalling distributed over double teeth, which usually occurs in practical engineering problems, is rarely reported. To remedy this deficiency, this paper constructs a new dynamical model of a gear system with double-teeth spalling fault and validates this model with various experimental tests. The dynamic characteristics of gear systems are obtained by considering the excitations induced by the number of spalling teeth, and the relative position of two faulty teeth. Moreover, to ensure the accuracy of dynamic model verification results and reduce the difficulty of fault feature analysis, a novel parameter-adaptive variational mode decomposition (VMD) method based on the ant lion optimization (ALO) is proposed to eliminate the background noise from the experimental signal. First, the ALO is used for the self-selection of the decomposition number K and the penalty factor â of the VMD. Then, the raw signal is decomposed into a set of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) by applying the ALO-VMD, and the IMFs whose effective weight kurtosis (EWK) is greater than zero are selected as the reconstructed signal. Combined with envelope spectrum analysis, the de-nosing ability of the proposed method is compared with that of the method known as particle swarm optimization-based variational mode decomposition (PSO-VMD), the fixed-parameter VMD, the empirical mode decomposition (EMD), and the local mean decomposition (LMD), respectively. The results indicate that the proposed dynamic model and background elimination method can provide a theoretical basis for spalling defect diagnosis of gear systems.

Reliability analysis may involve random variables and interval variables. In addition, some of the random variables may have interval distribution parameters owing to limited information. This kind of uncertainty is called second order uncertainty. This article develops an efficient reliability method for problems involving the three aforementioned types of uncertain input variables. The analysis produces the maximum and minimum reliability and is computationally demanding because two loops are needed: a reliability analysis loop with respect to random variables and an interval analysis loop for extreme responses with respect to interval variables. The first order reliability method and nonlinear optimization are used for the two loops, respectively. For computational efficiency, the two loops are combined into a single loop by treating the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) optimal conditions of the interval analysis as constraints. Three examples are presented to demonstrate the proposed method.