A large deviation theorem of the Cramér–Petrov type and a ranking limit theorem of Loève are used to derive an approximation for the statisticaldistribution of the failure time of fibrous materials. For that, fibrousmaterials are modeled as a series of independent and identical bundles of parallel filaments and the asymptotic distribution of their failure time is determined in terms of statistical characteristics of the individual filaments, as both the number of filaments in each bundle and the number of bundles in the chain grow large simultaneously. While keeping the numbernof filaments in each bundle fixed and increasing only the chain lengthkleads to a Weibull limiting distribution for the failure time, letting both increase in such a way that logk(n)= o(n), we show that the limit distribution isfor. Since fibrous materials which are both long and have many filaments prevail, the result is of importance in the materials science area since refined approximations to failure-time distributions can be achieved.
