Taking into account the uncertainty in material property and component quality, a complex mechanical component such as a gear should be treated as a series system instead of a component when evaluating its reliability, since there exist many sites of equal likelihood to fail. Besides, conventional system reliability model is not applicable to such a system because of the statistical dependence among the failures of the every element (damage site). The present paper presents a model to estimate complex mechanical component reliability by incorporating order statistic of element strength into load-strength interference analysis, which can deal with multiple failure mechanisms, reflect statistical dependence among element failure events and that among different failure modes.
