AN ADVANCED PROBABILISTIC STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS METHOD FOR IMPLICIT PERFORMANCE FUNCTIONS

Y.-T. Wu, H. R. Millwater, and T. A. Cruse Department of Engineering Mechanics Southwest Research Institute 6220 Culebra Road San Antonio, Texas 78284 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 most commonly used probabilistic analysis tool is the mean-based, second-moment method which provides only the first two statistical moments. This paper presents a generalized advanced meanvalue (AMV) method which is capable of establishing the distributions to provide additional information for reliability design. The method requires slightly more computations than the second-moment method but is highly efficient relative to the other alternative methods. Several examples arepresentedtodemonstrate the method. In particular, the examples show that the AMV method can be used to solve problems involving non-monotonic functions that result in truncated distributions.