Determination of Reliability of Selected Case Furniture Constructions

The reliability of furniture constitutes one of the most important features taken into consideration when buying furniture. However, to evaluate furniture reliability, furniture manufacturers often rely on their own experiences and common patterns without the usage of specialized tools. The presented work aimed to develop a mathematical apparatus to be used in a specially created web application that would enable the calculation of the reliability of the selected furniture joints and whole case furniture structures. This paper describes the functionality features of the newly created web application, which could be used in the furniture industry practice providing a valuable support tool for engineering works. In this paper, the reliability calculations are presented for the examples of furniture eccentric joints and case-type furniture made of those joints. Two different materials, namely MDF and laminated three-layer particleboard, of 18 mm are considered. The achieved results confirm the higher reliability of the furniture eccentric joints made of MDF of 18 mm in comparison to the furniture eccentric joints made of particleboard of the same thickness. The calculations of reliability for the analyzed construction of furniture confirmed also that the reliability improved when the parallel reliability structure was adapted. That was the case for both the MDF and laminated three-layer particleboard.