抄録
This paper describes a new numerical integration method for evaluating structural failure probability. The proposed method utilizes the centerline directional vectors, which are related to the specified numbers of finite element meshes divided on the surface of the unit hypersphere. The failure probability is evaluated numerically by using the values of hyperareas of the finite element meshes and conditional failure probabilities on the centerline directions of the meshes. To save computational efforts, the calculation of the conditional failure probabilities is restricted in the effective directional regions, where all the distances from the origin to limit state surfaces are short enough and within the limit of the effective distance range. The effective distance range is determined in the preliminary search procedure to get the information about the limit state surfaces situation.
Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the validity of the proposed method to evaluate the structural failure probabilities.
