Aerostatic Reliability Analysis of Long-Span Bridges

The response surface Monte Carlo method (RSMCM) is proposed for reliability analysis of aerostatic response and aerostatic stability for different types of long-span bridges, in which the nonlinear effects due to geometric nonlinearity and deformation-dependent aerostatic loads are taken into consideration. The geometric parameters, the material parameters, and the aerostatic coefficients of the bridge girder are regarded as random variables in the proposed method. RSMCM has higher accuracy in comparison with the traditional response surface method and requires much less computational cost than the conventional Monte Carlo method. The proposed method is applied to reliability analysis of aerostatic response and aerostatic stability of the Hong Kong Ting Kau Bridge, and reasonable results illustrating effectiveness of the method are obtained.