7. Structural reliability analysis approach

Assessing the reliability of a structure therefore involves :

• identify all relevant significant ageing mechanisms, after analysis of experience feedback;

• establish the failure equation Z = 0, list the important basic variables X _i for the aging mechanism under consideration;

• identify sources of uncertainty and probabilize the variables X _i , the main sources of uncertainty in the failure equation;

• transform this failure equation into the reduced normal transformed space (u-space);

• calculate the index β, approximating the transformed surface using FORM or SORM methods; these transformation and calculation tasks are generally...