An efficient epistemic uncertainty analysis method for structural-acoustic problem based on evidence theory

Abstract

Evidence theory has a strong ability to deal with the epistemic uncertainty, based on which the uncertain parameters with limited information can be conveniently treated. To address the problem that epistemic uncertainties exist in the structural-acoustic system, an efficient numerical method is developed in this article to compute the response of structural-acoustic system with evidence variables by integrating the matrix decomposition technique with the finite element modeling. In the epistemic uncertain structural-acoustic system, the evidence variables are assumed to be uniform without varying spatially. Inspired by the probability theory, the mean value, standard deviation and cumulative distribution are used to describe the distribution characteristics of evidence variables. To reduce the computational cost, the interval analysis technique is adopted to acquire the approximate response bounds for each focal element. Numerical example of a shell structural-acoustic problem is given to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the present method.