Title: Fast Fourier transform based system reliability analysis

Authors: Phani R. Adduri, Ravi C. Penmetsa

Addresses: Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, Wright State University, Dayton, OH 45435, USA. ' Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, Wright State University, Dayton, OH 45435, USA

Abstract: In probabilistic analysis, the failure of a structural system is governed by multiple failure criteria, all of which are to be taken into consideration for the reliability estimation. The accuracy of the estimated structural failure probability highly depends on the joint failure surface and its representation. Moreover, the evaluation of limit-states often requires computationally expensive simulations. To improve the efficiency of reliability analysis methods high quality function approximations for each of the limit-states and the joint failure surface are considered in this paper. Once the joint failure surface is represented using a surrogate model, the convolution integral can be solved efficiently using a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) technique. Due to the high non-linearity of the joint failure region, a methodology is developed to evaluate the convolution integral based on multiple approximations over several disjoint regions spanning the entire design space. Numerical examples are presented to show the applicability, efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method.

Keywords: system reliability; fast Fourier transforms; FFTs; convolution integral; probabilistic analysis; reliability estimation; reliability analysis; structural failure; joint failure surface; failure probability.

DOI: 10.1504/IJRS.2007.014964

International Journal of Reliability and Safety, 2007 Vol.1 No.3, pp.239 - 259

Published online: 28 Aug 2007 *

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