Sensitivity analysis of aircraft structural fatigue reliability under mixed uncertainty

Abstract

Fatigue is the main failure mode of the structure. The aircraft structure is subject to multi-level cyclic loading, which is prone to fatigue damage, reduces reliability, and affects flight safety. Various uncertainties are inevitably associated with the factors related to the fatigue performance of the structure. In particular, for the variables with insufficient information, their uncertainties are hard to describe by the probability density function. In this paper, these variables are treated as interval variables. The sensitivity analysis of the aircraft structure fatigue reliability model under mixed uncertainties is studied. On the basis of the definition of the distance between interval numbers, the interval distance indexes are proposed as a global sensitivity measure for a mixed random-interval model system. To reduce the computational cost, the method combining the space partition with unscented transformation (SP-UT) is used to calculate the proposed indexes. Lastly, the proposed indexes and method are applied to solve the aircraft structure fatigue problem. Compared with the traditional MCS method, the proposed method has proved to be more conducive and efficient.