Wind-induced probabilistic failure analysis of super large cooling tower with random field properties

Abstract

As the largest civil engineering structure, its failure analysis has become to the focus of researches. However, most of studies ignore the inherent spatial variability of material properties, which exist widely in the actual engineering. Therefore, the influence of the spatial uncertainty is still unknown. In this study, an actual super large cooling tower under strong wind is investigated by the finite element (FE) analysis method first. And a three-stage non-Gaussian random field representation is proposed to characterize the spatial variability of material properties. Then 1200 random FE models with random concrete properties are investigated and analyzed. The results show that the spatial variability of material properties will not influence the wind-induced failure mode, i.e., the failure of the cooling tower is still caused by the loss of material strengths. However, the ultimate capacity will be affected by random material properties. The capacity is generally distributed in a lognormal form, and the mean value is less than the capacity obtained from the deterministic model. In some cases, the deterministic analysis will overestimate the actual capacity of the cooling tower.