RELIABILITY OF CORROSION-DAMAGED STEEL STRUCTURES USING INTERVAL PROBABILITY-THEORY

Engineering decisions concerning the performance of existing structure s must be made in the presence of uncertainties. The remaining capacit y of corroded steel structures provides a good example of different as pects of uncertainty. These include: an unknown or partially known ext ent of damage; a variability in loading and an uncertain reserve of st ructural capacity depending on the mode of failure. The theory of stru ctural reliability has been developed to provide a method of analysis for structural safety. In this paper, methods are proposed to compute the component reliability of corrosion-damaged steel members. The appl ication of a recently developed theory called interval probability the ory for system reliability is illustrated using the data obtained from actual samples of corroded beams. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Scie nce Ltd. All rights reserved.