The book exposes three alternative and competing approaches to uncertainty analysis in engineering. It is composed of some essays on various sub-topics like random vibrations, probabilistic reliability, fuzzy-sets-based analysis, unknown-but-bounded variables, stochastic linearization, possible difficulties with stochastic analysis of structures.
This book serves as a textbook for advanced courses as it introduces state-of-the-art information and the latest research results on diverse problems in the structural wind engineering field. The topics include wind climates, design wind speed estimation, bluff body aerodynamics and applications, wind-induced building responses, wind, gust factor approach, wind loads on components and cladding, debris impacts, wind loading codes and standards, computational tools and computational fluid dynamics techniques, habitability to building vibrations, damping in buildings, and suppression of wind-induced vibrations. Graduate students and expert engineers will find the book especially interesting and relevant to their research and work.
Our knowledge to model, design, analyse, maintain, manage and predict the life-cycle performance of infrastructure systems is continually growing. However, the complexity of these systems continues to increase and an integrated approach is necessary to understand the effect of technological, environmental, economic, social, and political interactions on the life-cycle performance of engineering infrastructure. In order to accomplish this, methods have to be developed to systematically analyse structure and infrastructure systems, and models have to be formulated for evaluating and comparing the risks and benefits associated with various alternatives. Civil engineers must maximize the life-cycle benefits of these systems to serve the needs of our society by selecting the best balance of the safety, economy, resilience and sustainability requirements despite imperfect information and knowledge. Within the context of this book, the necessary concepts are introduced and illustrated with applications to civil and marine structures. This book is intended for an audience of researchers and practitioners world‐wide with a background in civil and marine engineering, as well as people working in infrastructure maintenance, management, cost and optimization analysis. The chapters originally published as articles in Structure and Infrastructure Engineering.
This volume presents the Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Vibration Problems, 2011, Prague, Czech Republic. ICOVP 2011 brings together again scientists from different backgrounds who are actively working on vibration-related problems of engineering both in theoretical and applied fields, thus facilitating a lively exchange of ideas, methods and results between the many different research areas. The aim is that reciprocal intellectual fertilization will take place and ensure a broad interdisciplinary research field. The topics, indeed, cover a wide variety of vibration-related subjects, from wave problems in solid mechanics to vibration problems related to biomechanics. The first ICOVP conference was held in 1990 at A.C. College, Jalpaiguri, India, under the co-chairmanship of Professor M.M. Banerjee and Professor P. Biswas. Since then it has been held every 2 years at various venues across the World.
This volume contains thirty-one papers presented at the Twelfth Scientific Meeting of the IFIP Working Group on Reliability and Optimization of Structural Systems which took place in Aalborg, Denmark, from May 22-25, 2005. The Working Group Conference was organized by the IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) Working Group 7.5 of the Technical Committee on Modelling and Optimization. The purpose of the Working Group is to promote modern structural system reliability and optimization theory and its applications, to stimulate research, development and application of structural system reliability and optimization theory, to assist and advance research and development in these fields, to further the dissemination and exchange of information on reliability and optimization of structural systems, and to encourage education in structural system reliability and optimization theory.
These are the papers presented at the Fib-RILEM workshop held in Madrid, Spain, in November 2010. The assessment of deterioration and aging of concrete structures, most commonly through reinforcement corrosion, is not considered in current structural codes or standards. Some guidelines manuals exist, and research has been done, but there is as yet no accepted methodology nor models that could be used by engineers. This book deals with all aspects related to modelling of corroding structures and provides state-of-the-art information on structural models for corroding structures.
Concrete structures have been built for more than 100 years. At first, reinforced concrete was used for buildings and bridges, even for those with large spans. Lack of methods for structural analysis led to conservative and reliable design. Application of prestressed concrete started in the 40s and strongly developed in the 60s. The spans of bridges and other structures like halls, industrial structures, stands, etc. grew significantly larger. At that time, the knowledge of material behaviour, durability and overall structural performance was substantially less developed than it is today. In many countries statically determined systems with a fragile behavior were designed for cast in situ as well as precast structures. Lack of redundancy resulted in a low level of robustness in structural systems. In addition, the technical level of individual technologies (e.g. grouting of prestressed cables) was lower than it is today. The number of concrete structures, including prestressed ones, is extremely high. Over time and with increased loading, the necessity of maintaining safety and performance parameters is impossible without careful maintenance, smaller interventions, strengthening and even larger reconstructions. Although some claim that unsatisfactory structures should be replaced by new ones, it is often impossible, as authorities, in general, have only limited resources. Most structures have to remain in service, probably even longer than initially expected. In order to keep the existing concrete structures in an acceptable condition, the development of methods for monitoring, inspection and assessment, structural identification, nonlinear analysis, life cycle evaluation and safety and prediction of the future behaviour, etc. is necessary. The scatter of individual input parameters must be considered as a whole. This requires probabilistic approaches to individual partial problems and to the overall analysis. The members of the fib Task Group 2.8 “Safety and performance concepts” wrote, on the basis of the actual knowledge and experience, a comprehensive document that provides crucial knowledge for existing structures, which is also applicable to new structures. This guide to good practice is divided into 10 basic chapters dealing with individual issues that are critical for activities associated with preferably existing concrete structures. Bulletin 86 starts with the specification of the performance-based requirements during the entire lifecycle. The risk issues are described in chapter two. An extensive part is devoted to structural reliability, including practical engineering approaches and reliability assessment of existing structures. Safety concepts for design consider the lifetime of structures and summarise safety formats from simple partial safety factors to develop approaches suitable for application in sophisticated, probabilistic, non-linear analyses. Testing for design and the determination of design values from the tests is an extremely important issue. This is especially true for the evaluation of existing structures. Inspection and monitoring of existing structures are essential for maintenance, for the prediction of remaining service life and for the planning of interventions. Chapter nine presents probabilistically-based models for material degradation processes. Finally, case studies are presented in chapter ten. The results of the concrete structures monitoring as well as their application for assessment and prediction of their future behaviour are shown. The risk analysis of highway bridges was based on extensive monitoring and numerical evaluation programs. Case studies perfectly illustrate the application of the methods presented in the Bulletin. The information provided in this guide is very useful for practitioners and scientists. It provides the reader with general procedures, from the specification of requirements, monitoring, assessment to the prediction of the structures’ lifecycles. However, one must have a sufficiently large amount of experimental and other data (e.g. construction experience) in order to use these methods correctly. This data finally allows for a statistical evaluation. As it is shown in case studies, extensive monitoring programs are necessary. The publication of this guide and other documents developed within the fib will hopefully help convince the authorities responsible for safe and fluent traffic on bridges and other structures that the costs spent in monitoring are first rather small, and second, they will repay in the form of a serious assessment providing necessary information for decision about maintenance and future of important structures.
This volume contains 28 papers by renowned international experts on the latest advances in structural reliability methods and applications, engineering risk analysis and decision making, new optimization techniques and various applications in civil engineering. Moreover, several contributions focus on the assessment and optimization of existing str
Taking an engineering, rather than a mathematical, approach, Bounding uncertainty in Civil Engineering - Theoretical Background deals with the mathematical theories that use convex sets of probability distributions to describe the input data and/or the final response of systems. The particular point of view of the authors is centered on the applications to civil engineering problems, and the theory of random sets has been adopted as a basic and relatively simple model. However, the authors have tried to elucidate its connections to the more general theory of imprecise probabilities, Choquet capacities, fuzzy sets, p-boxes, convex sets of parametric probability distributions, and approximate reasoning both in one dimension and in several dimensions with associated joint spaces. If choosing the theory of random sets may lead to some loss of generality, it has, on the other hand, allowed for a self-contained selection of the topics and a more unified presentation of the theoretical contents and algorithms. With over 80 examples worked out step by step, the book should assist newcomers to the subject (who may otherwise find it difficult to navigate a vast and dispersed literature) in applying the techniques described to their own specific problems.