A CONTRIBUTION TO THE SFE-BASED RELIABILITY ASSESSMENT OF NONLINEAR STRUCTURES UNDER DYNAMIC LOADING

This paper presents a procedure which allows for a stochastic finite e lement (SFE)-based reliability analysis of large nonlinear structures under dynamic loading involving both structural and loading randomness with relatively little computational effort when compared to traditio nal Monte Carlo methods. The analysis is based on the identification o f important random variables by means of a transformation of the vecto r of original random variables to the uncorrelated space and subsequen t sensitivity analyses. Only few nonlinear computations using the most important identified random variables are performed to determine poin ts on the limit state surface. Subsequently, the response surface meth od (RSM) is employed to estimate the reliability of the structure.