Linkage of Damage Evaluation to Structural System Reliability

Nondestructive Damage Evaluation (NDE) techniques yield the damage location and its size from the modal characteristics of pre-damaged and post-damaged structures. To predict the system reliability of the aging structure, results from the NDE are integrated into the element/component failure probabilities. The element/component failure probabilities can be calculated from failure functions for each element/component with the aid of techniques from a structural reliability analysis. In this paper, a method to estimate the system reliability of a structure that is based on the reliabilities of elements/components in a given structure is presented. The efficacy of the combination of the nondestructive damage detection and the structural reliability evaluation is demonstrated using pre-damaged and post-damaged modal data obtained from numerical simulations of a rigid frame.