Evaluating Spillway Adequacy
More than a third of all dam failures are caused by overtopping. Equipment malfunctions or operations errors are sometimes to blame, but the principal cause is inadequate spillway capacity....
Piping in Earth Dams of Dispersive Clay (Paper introduced by Norman L. Ryker)
In 1971 Jim Sherard was engaged to investigate the common failure of a group of Soil Conservation Service (SCS) floodwater retarding earthfill dams built between 1957 and 1970, eleven...
Aversion to Epistemic Uncertainties in Rational Decision Making: Effects on Engineering Risk Management
When faced with epistemic uncertainties in a decision problem, subjective expected-utility theory (SEU) implies that the only relevant characteristic of these uncertainties is the mean...
On Deciding Between the Use of Engineering Standards and Risk Analysis
Risk analysis offers advantages for the optimal design and maintenance of infrastructure, but it is not always practical to apply due to the nature of certain types of infrastructure....
Asymptotic Importance Sampling
One of the main issues in reliability analysis is the accurate and efficient calculation of the multivariate reliability integral. The Asymptotic Importance Sampling Technique (AIS) selects...
Comparison of Some Importance Sampling Techniques in Structural Reliability
The approximate calculation of structural reliabilities by FORM/SORM is well known. Nevertheless, alternatives or at least methods with which the error by these methods can be quantified...
Incorporating Corrosion in Reliability-Based Design of Anchored Bulkheads
Corrosion of steel is an important factor in the design of marine structures. A reliability analysis of anchored bulkheads showed that corrosion changes the critical failure mode from...
Sensitivity Evaluation of Simulation Methods for Reliability Assessment
Commonly used reliability assessment methods include the first-order methods, second-order methods, and Monte Carlo simulation methods with or without variance reduction techniques. The...
High Order Statistics in Structural Reliability
The new simulation technique described in this paper attempts to avoid the significant amount of arbitrariness involved in the choice of the sampling distribution in the increasingly popular...
A Mathematical Tool Set for SORM Reliability Methods
FORM and SORM methods are used for approximating failure probabilities. Here an overview of the main mathematical results of SORM methods is given: Classification of asymptotic behavior,...
Experiences with Experimental Design Schemes for Failure Surface Estimation and Reliability
When using FORM and SORM to predict the probability of failure for a structural component a model for the failure function has to exist. For certain structural components a mechanical...
Probabilistic Evaluation of Bearing Capacity of Shallow Foundations
A probabilistic model is developed to evaluate the bearing capacity of shallow foundations. The bearing capacity formulation proposed by Terzaghi is used but with the bearing capacity...
Seismic Response Variability of Soil Sites
The seismic response variability of soil sites due to randomness associated with both the input base motion and spatial inhomogeneity of the shear modulus is investigated. Some numerical...
On a Procedure to Estimate the Reliability of Mechanical Components
A procedure, based on the response surface concept is suggested to estimate the failure probability of mechanical components and structures under static as well as dynamic loading conditions....
An Advanced First-Order Method for System Reliability
This paper proposes an iterative first-order method for accurate estimation of the joint failure region of two nonlinear limit states. Current methods use either a first-order approach...
A Systems Reliability Approach to the Safety of Steel Connections
A methodology is presented to determine the probability of failure of steel connections using a systems approach. Results indicate that connection safety evaluations which do not use this...
Structural Reliability and Failure Mechanism Determination Using Monte Carlo Simulation with Variance Reduction Techniques
The objective of this paper is to present a possible method for assessing a structure's reliability and determining the collapse mechanism using Monte-Carlo simulation with variance reduction...
A Two-Stage Safety Assessment Methodology for Construction Activities
The control of construction activities requires the evaluation of the condition of the control attributes of interest. In order to develop the required methodology, a model of the construction...
Risk Based Structural Optimization
Risk based structural optimization problems for structural systems are formulated on basis of a so-called risk index. The risk index is defined as a consequence modified reliability index...
Non-Intrusive Rayleigh Wave Measurement System for Soil Profiling in Ports
Accurate shear wave velocity profiles have been long recognized as essential data to evaluate the dynamic response of soil deposits and soil-structure interaction under earthquake and...
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