Abstract: The Birnbaum-Saunders distribution has been widely studied and applied to reliability studies. This paper proposes a novel use of this distribution to analyze the effect on hardness, a material mechanical property, when incorporating nano-particles inside a polymeric bone cement. A plain variety and two modified types of mesoporous silica nano-particles are considered. In biomaterials, one can study the effect of nano-particles on mechanical response reliability. Experimental data collected by the authors from a micro-indentation test about hardness of a commercially available polymeric bone cement are analyzed. Hardness is modeled with the Birnbaum-Saunders distribution and Bayesian inference is performed to derive a methodology, which allows us to evaluate the effect of using nano-particles at different loadings by the R software. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.