STOCHASTIC DYNAMIC SENSITIVITY OF UNCERTAIN STRUCTURES SUBJECTED TO RANDOM EARTHQUAKE LOADING

The present study involves computation of stochastic sensitivity of structures with uncertain structural parameters subjected to random earthquake loading. The formulations are provided in frequency domain. A strong earthquake-induced ground motion is considered as a random process defined by respective power spectral density function. The uncertain structural parameters are modelled as homogeneous Gaussian stochastic field and discretized by the local averaging method. The discretized stochastic field is simulated by the Cholesky decomposition of respective co-variance matrix. By expanding the dynamic stiffness matrix about its reference value, the advantage of Neumann Expansion technique is explored within the framework of Monte Carlo simulation, to compute responses as well as sensitivity of response quantities. This approach involves only a single decomposition of the dynamic stiffness matrix for the entire simulated structure and the facility that several stochastic fields can be tackled simultaneously are basic advantages of the Neumann Expansion. The proposed algorithm is explained by an example problem.