Designing robust structures – A nonlinear simulation based approach
Section snippets
Problem specification
Robustness is one of the primary requirements to ensure a structure to operate faultless over a period of time and must thus be incorporated in the design process, already. This involves, on one hand, accounting for considerable uncertainty in the problem specification and, on the other hand, appropriately assessing the robustness of a structure.
For the robustness of a structure no general definition exists. In the past decades two different points of view have been developed regarding the
Robustness assessment
Robust structural design generally aims at an optimum adjustment of the design parameters with respect to defined design preferences for the mean and regarding fluctuations of structural responses. The method proposed herein focuses on the latter, which refers to structural robustness. Structural robustness is introduced as a global measure for the degree of independence between changes in the whole set of structural parameters and the associated fluctuations in structural responses. This
General scheme
The general scheme of designing robust structures may be summarized with the flowchart in Fig. 2. The particular procedure components are elucidated in the following subsections. Some background information regarding the employed numerical methodologies is provided in Appendix A.
Initial situation
The procedure of robust structural design starts with the specification and the quantification of all structural and design parameters. At this point a distinction is made between two types of uncertain input parameters
Steel girder under dynamic loading
The procedure of designing robust structures is demonstrated by means of the simple steel girder shown in Fig. 9. The girder is excited to vibrate by a harmonic loading that consists of two components. This affects node 1 transverse to the bar axis and causes time-dependent displacements v(1, t) in load direction and rotations φ(1, t) of this node, which are summarized in the displacement vectorA displacement norm is then calculated with v(1, t) in m and φ(1, t) in rad and with
Conclusions
The presented method for designing robust structures may provide a viable tool to derive a proper structural design. It is capable of processing the results from any uncertain structural analysis and is independent of the computational model. In the result the construction engineer is provided with design parameter ranges, from which the final design vector can be selected in view of subjective preferences without a need for additional verifications by structural analysis. In contrast to the
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
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