TABLE OF CONTENTS JUNGWON HUH
Ocean Engineering Program, Yosu National University
Yeosu, 550-749, Korea
E-mail: jwonhuh@yosu.ac.kr
ACHINTYA HALDAR
Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ85721, USA
E-mail: haldar@u.arizona.edu
Reliability analysis techniques have matured in recent years, but they are not yet widely accepted by the deterministic community. One of the major objections is that the available techniques are not adequate to evaluate the risk of real complex structures. To overcome this concern, a new, efficient and accurate hybrid finite element-based reliability method is presented to evaluate the reliability of real nonlinear structures excited by short duration dynamic loadings applied in the time domain, including earthquake loading. It intelligently integrates the response surface method, the finite element method, the first-order reliability method, and an iterative linear interpolation scheme. The method explicitly considers nonlinearities due to geometry and material characteristics, boundary or support conditions, connection conditions and the uncertainty in them. Time domain reliability of any structures that can be represented by finite elements can be evaluated with this approach, thus removing one of the major concerns of the deterministic community. The applicability of the method is demonstrated with the help of several examples.
Despite significant recent progresses in the risk and reliability analysis techniques, a large segment of the engineering profession is not familiar with them and thus fails to use them in everyday practices. One of the major factors is that the available reliability methods fail to capture the realistic structural behavior. They are not similar...
