RELIABILITY COMPUTATION ON STIFFENED BENDING PLATES

The present paper proposes a practical and compact finite element reli ability analysis method for application to stiffened bending plates. I t combines finite-element, reliability, and sensitivity techniques. Th e main parameters of stiffened bending plates and external loads are m odelled as random fields within the plate. The stiffened plates are di scretized into plate and beam elements, while the finite differences h ave been used for sensitivity calculations. Maximum allowable displace ments and stresses are used as failure criteria to establish the limit state functions. Numerical results are shown for a stiffened plate ex ample.