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Describes research into the problem of estimating the distribution parameters of failure data of industrial equipment subject to two failure modes. It is assumed that time to failure data are available, but it is unknown for each failure which of the two main failure modes caused the event. A loglikelihood method was developed and tested on generated mixed failure mode data. Shortcomings of this method triggered the development of two additional methods, MINESS and MINESS+, which minimize the error sum of squares of the reliability function, after separating the failure data into two sets.

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