Probabilistic methods in hydraulic and spatial structural analysis

Abstract

In early stages of analysis of structural safety, deterministic methods are in dominant position. Regardless of the uncertainty existing in the structural characteristics, load parameters, boundary conditions as well as computational models, only a safety coefficient is utilized to decide whether the structures analyzed are safe or not in design codes of many countries. The risk the deterministic analysis results in, or strong or weak, is unavoidable in this situation. Naturally, as an effective choice, the probabilistic methods are developed to predict structural responses with respect to the diverse uncertainty related to the structures. The final goal of these methods is to make designed structures to satisfy reliability requirements of structural safety under some probabilistic level and the constriction of economic conditions. However, in practical industrial engineering, different types of structures located in various environments lead to the difficulties dealing with the concrete reliability problems. This challenge needs us to improve and extend the existing probabilistic methods for implementing the reliability based analysis and design of structures in stochastic environments.
This organized session is focused on probabilistic modeling and numerical methods to analyze the reliability problems faced in structures, especially hydraulic and spatial structures. In view of the challenge from the reliability analysis of different types of engineering structures, contributions are invited with emphasis on both reliability theory and applications. Topics may cover wide range such as reliability methods, structural reliability, probabilistic modeling in engineering, natural hazards modeling /analysis, and applications. When involving in new analysis methods, main attention is suggested to be paid to the numerical efficiency of the proposed approaches for reliability analysis. In case of coping with applications in hydraulic and spatial structures, the improvements and practicability of the presented probabilistic methods applied in analysis and design need to be emphasized

Organizers

Bin Huang, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, China, (biwhuang@263.net)
Zhengnong Li, Hunan University, Changsha, Hunan, China