Book Description

Accurate modeling of the joint stochastic nature of the strength properties of dimension lumber is essential to the determination of reliability-based design safety factors. This report reviews the major techniques for obtaining bivariate distributions and then discusses bivariate distributions whose marginal distributions suggest they might be useful for modeling the joint distribution of two strength properties. Finally, we pick a bivariate Weibull distribution and show that we can write its likelihood function under a proof loading scheme, offering the possibility that it can be used to model the joint distribution of two properties that must each be measured using a destructive test.