Universitätsbibliothek
Weimar Open Access

In engineering science the modeling and numerical analysis of complex systems and relations plays an important role. In order to realize such an investigation, for example a stochastic analysis, in a reasonable computational time, approximation procedure have been developed. A very famous approach is the response surface method, where the relation between input and output quantities is represented for example by global polynomials or local interpolation schemes as Moving Least Squares (MLS). In recent years artificial neural networks (ANN) have been applied as well for such purposes. Recently an adaptive response surface approach for reliability analyses was proposed, which is very efficient concerning the number of expensive limit state function evaluations. Due to the applied simplex interpolation the procedure is limited to small dimensions. In this paper this approach is extended for larger dimensions using combined ANN and MLS response surfaces for evaluating the adaptation criterion with only one set of joined limit state points. As adaptation criterion a combination by using the maximum difference in the conditional probabilities of failure and the maximum difference in the approximated radii is applied. Compared to response surfaces on directional samples or to plain directional sampling the failure probability can be estimated with a much smaller number of limit state points.

Application of approximate response functions in structural reliability analysis

New concepts for moving least squares: An interpolating non-singular weighting function and weighted nodal least squares

Application of the "Fictitious Crack Model" to meshless crack growth simulations

The complex failure process of concrete structures can not be described in detail by standard engineering design formulas. The numerical analysis of crack development in concrete is essential for several problems. In the last decades a large number of research groups have dealt with this topic and several models and algorithms were developed. However, most of these methods show some difficulties and are limited to special cases. The goal of this study was to develop an automatic algorithm for the efficient simulation of multiple cracking in plain and reinforced concrete structures of medium size. For this purpose meshless methods were used to describe the growth of crack surfaces. Two meshless interpolation schemes were improved for a simple application. The cracking process of concrete has been modeled using a stable criterion for crack growth in combination with an improved cohesive crack model which can represent the failure process under combined crack opening and crack sliding very well. This crack growth algorithm was extended in order to represent the fluctuations of the concrete properties by enlarging the single-parameter random field concept for multiple correlated material parameters.