In order to ensure the safety and reliability of power and energy systems (wind turbines, gas/steam turbines, power plants, etc.) structural integrity and lifetime prediction of engineering materials and structures have recently become areas of high development for these systems. In many countries such as the UK and the USA, currently facing a potential future mismatch in energy production and transformation, increasing interest is being paid to new techniques to discover and understand the failure mechanisms and lifetime prediction of engineering materials and structures. This includes the metals and composites used in hot section components like turbine blades and disks in power and energy systems. Mechanical properties, microstructures and structural resistance of systems and components often require stochastic considerations related to failure mechanism modeling and analysis, due to unexpected ageing related degradation. In addition, various sources of uncertainty arising from a simplified representation of the actual physical process or sparse information on manufacturing, material properties, and loading profiles contribute to the stochastic behavior under operation.

Accordingly, continued improvements on reliability assessment have been possible through the accurate modeling of failure mechanisms by introducing advanced mathematical approaches. Through combining the deterministic and probabilistic modeling techniques, research on failure mechanisms and reliability can provide assurance for new structures at the design stage and ensure the integrity of the construction at the fabrication phase. Specifically, both power and energy system failure occurs under multi-sources of uncertainty resulting from load variations in usages, material properties, geometry variations within tolerances, and other uncontrolled variations. Thus, advanced methods and applications for theoretical, numerical, and experimental contributions that address these issues on failure mechanism and reliability analysis are desired and expected, which attempt to prevent over-design and unnecessary inspection, and provide tools to enable a balance between safety and economy to be achieved.

The aim of this Special Issue is to provide the data, models and tools necessary for performing structural integrity and lifetime prediction, resulting in the use of advanced mathematical, numerical, and experimental techniques. Therefore, researchers are invited to provide original research and review articles that seek for accurate and efficient failure mechanism and reliability modeling, design, analysis, and so forth.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Metals/composites in power & energy systems
• Hot section components
• Ageing modeling and analysis
• Lifetime prediction of power & energy systems
• Structural integrity and reliability assessment
• Power plant materials
• Failure mechanisms
• Damage/degradation of power & energy systems
• Scale/notch effects
• Fatigue and fracture assessment of power & energy systems
• Very-high-cycle fatigue
• Prognostic and health management