Abstract
In this study, the tunneling method is applied to the reliability analysis of a laminated composite plate subject to in-plane loads. In the first order reliability method (FORM), the structural reliability is evaluated as the minimum distance from the origin to the limit state surface in the standard normal distribution space. It is formulated as a nonlinear optimization problem. However, it is difficult to find the design point, when the limit state surface has several local minimum points such as a case of the laminated composite plate subject to the first ply failure. In order to find the global design point, the tunneling method is applied as one of global optimization methods. A new tunneling function suitable for the FORM is proposed to find the other design point which has a lower objective function value and satisfies the equality constraint. Through numerical calculations, the efficiency of the tunneling method is demonstrated.
