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Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE A (Applied Physics & Engineering)  2016, Vol. 17 Issue (9): 677-688    DOI: 10.1631/jzus.A1500342
Articles     
Estimating the time-dependent reliability of aging structures in the presence of incomplete deterioration information
Cao Wang, Quan-wang Li, Long Pang, A-ming Zou
Department of Civil Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China; School of Civil Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney 2006, Australia
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Abstract  The performance of an aging structure is commonly evaluated under the framework of reliability analysis, where the uncertainties associated with the structural resistance and loads should be taken into account. In practical engineering, the probability distribution of resistance deterioration is often inaccessible due to the limits of available data, although the statistical parameters such as mean value and standard deviation can be obtained by fitting or empirical judgments. As a result, an error of structural reliability may be introduced when an arbitrary probabilistic distribution is assumed for the resistance deterioration. With this regard, in this paper, the amount of reliability error posed by different choices of deterioration distribution is investigated, and a novel approach is proposed to evaluate the averaged structural reliability under incomplete deterioration information, which does not rely on the probabilistic weight of the candidate deterioration models. The reliability for an illustrative structure is computed parametrically for varying probabilistic models of deterioration and different resistance conditions, through which the reliability associated with different deterioration models is compared, and the application of the proposed method is illustrated.

Key wordsTime-dependent reliability      Deterioration model      Error quantification      Averaged reliability      Structural safety     
Received: 20 December 2015      Published: 08 September 2016
CLC:  TU312  
Cite this article:

Cao Wang, Quan-wang Li, Long Pang, A-ming Zou. Estimating the time-dependent reliability of aging structures in the presence of incomplete deterioration information. Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE A (Applied Physics & Engineering), 2016, 17(9): 677-688.

URL:

http://www.zjujournals.com/xueshu/zjus-a/10.1631/jzus.A1500342     OR     http://www.zjujournals.com/xueshu/zjus-a/Y2016/V17/I9/677

[1] Cao Wang, Quan-wang Li, A-ming Zou, Long Zhang. A realistic resistance deterioration model for time-dependent reliability analysis of aging bridges[J]. Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE A (Applied Physics & Engineering), 2015, 16(7): 513-524.