Stochastic analysis of thin beams and plates incorporating von-Kármán nonlinear strains using meshless method

Abstract

The current paper proposes methods for stochastic meshless analysis of thin beams and plates, by considering von-Kármán nonlinear strains. Here, Young’s modulus is assumed to have a spatial variation over the domain and is modeled as a homogeneous random field. Further, it is discretized utilizing moving least square based shape functions. Gaussian and lognormal properties are presumed to model the randomness related to Young’s modulus. Element-free Galerkin method is used as the meshless tool. The present study suggests employing perturbation method if the quantities of interest are limited to the first or second probabilistic moments of the responses. The nonlinear equations in the proposed perturbation formulations are solved using Newton-Raphson iterative scheme for finding out the deterministic part of the response, as well as its initial two derivatives with respect to random variables. Additionally, if there is an interest in higher probabilistic moments, probability density functions, cumulative distribution functions, and so forth, the study proposes a method using high-dimensional model representation (HDMR) in the meshless framework. In HDMR, the nonlinear connection between input variables and the output response is represented in terms of hierarchical correlated function expansions. These hierarchical functions are approximated over the response values evaluated using deterministic analysis on selected number and combinations of control points of random variables involved. Lagrange interpolation method is employed for the construction of response surfaces. Unlike Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) which needs numerous deterministic nonlinear analyses to be performed during each simulation, HDMR requires only a few deterministic nonlinear analyses to construct the component functions. Hence, simulations performed on the reduced order models of high-dimensional response can be used to estimate the probabilistic moments as well as density functions and cumulative distributions of response, with high computational efficiency compared to MCS. The probabilistic moments and distributions produced for a range of coefficient of variation of input random field up to 30%, for both the normal and lognormal input random fields are compared with those provided by crude MCS on the system of equations and are observed to be matching well.