ADVANCED PROBABILISTIC STRUCTURAL-ANALYSIS METHOD FOR IMPLICIT PERFORMANCE FUNCTIONS

In probabilistic structural analysis, the performance or response functions usually are implicitly defined and must be solved by numerical analysis methods such as finite-element methods. In such cases, the commonly used probabilistic analysis tool is the mean-based second-moment method, which provides only the first two statistical moments. This paper presents an advanced mean-based method, which is capable of establishing the full probability distributions to provide additional information for reliability design. The method requires slightly more computations than the mean-based second-moment method but is highly efficient relative to the other alternative methods. Several examples are presented to demonstrate the method. In particular, the examples show that the new mean-based method can be used to solve problems involving nonmonotonic functions that result in truncated distributions. © 1990 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc., All rights reserved.