RELIABILITY-BASED STRUCTURAL OPTIMAL-DESIGN USING THE NEUMANN EXPANSION TECHNIQUE

The reliability-based structural optimization formulated using the adv anced first order second moment (AFOSM) method contains a suboptimizat ion process. This corresponds to obtaining the most probable failure p oint of the failure constraint and requires excessive computational wo rk to solve the random state equation with random parameters in the st iffness matrix. This paper presents a numerically efficient method to reduce the computational effort by using the Neumann expansion techniq ue to deal with the random state equation in the suboptimization proce ss. Several examples of truss and beam structures with uncertainties i n design variables and loads, including non-normal distributions, are taken. The results show the method can give accurate solutions and red uce computation time.