Extension of Integrated Force Method into Stochastic Domain

The Integrated Force Method (IFM) commonly used for deterministic analysis of structures has been extended into the stochastic domain. The perturbation method is used for stochastic analysis of IFM. The expressions developed for responses in IFM were programmed in both the symbolic Maple V and FORTRAN 90 codes. The formulas of mean values and covariance matrices were simplified for numerical efficiency. A number of examples were solved for thermo-mechanical loads to illustrate the procedure of stochastic analysis. The perturbation approach was compared to direct Monte Carlo simulations of both Integrated Force Method and Stiffness Method implemented in ANSYS. The perturbation method via Integrated Force Method is an efficient approach compared to Monte Carlo simulation.