Some Aspects of Structural Reliability Assurance for Random Excitation Processes

Abstract

Certain service loads, when applied to practical machines and structures, could be regarded as approximately deterministic. However, most of them would be, to a degree, of a random nature with complicated temporal variation. Hence, in order to assure the desired level of reliability of critical structural components under random loading, it is of crucial importance to clarify, in particular, the effect of the randomness of the applied load on the life distributions or probabilities of failure of the components, in addition to the effects of other various uncertainty factors of the components, in addition to the effects of other various uncertainty factors usually taken into account in the reliability assurance of structural components subjected to constant amplitude loadings. In this respect, in the present paper, the fundamental concept has been discussed and a state-of-the art survey has been made to ascertain the structural reliability for stationary random loads from the viewpoint of whether the effect of the applied random load on a critical structural component is cumulative or not.