COMPARISON OF APPROACHES TO LIFE-CYCLE ANALYSIS OF STRUCTURAL RELIABILITY USING RENEWAL PROCESSES

Abstract eng:
Civil engineering structures are often exposed to combinations of time-variant loads. Random load fluctuations within a life cycle may be well described by rectangular wave renewal processes with intermittencies. The present study is aimed at comparison of the techniques provided by Rackwitz [4], Melchers [6,20] and Sykora [8]. In addition estimates based on Turkstra’s rule [7] are provided. Reliability analyses of simple structures indicate that the upper bounds by Melchers and Sykora are in a good agreement and yield results close to the exact solution. Turkstra’s rule seems to be sufficiently accurate for civil engineering applications. It appears that load intermittencies can be neglected for the combination of intermittent loads when one of the loads is highly dominating. Too conservative results are then obtained for the combination of intermittent loads with similar effects. The expression provided by Rackwitz may not lead to an upper bound on the failure probability particularly for the combination of spike-like processes. Future research should be focused on a detailed comparison of the techniques by Melchers and Sykora with Turkstra’s rule.

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