Reliability estimation of structures under stochastic loading—A case study on nuclear piping

Generally structures are subjected to different types of loadings throughout their life time. These loads can be either discrete in nature or continuous in nature and also these can be either stationary or non stationary processes. This means that the structural reliability analysis not only considers random variables but also considers random variables which are functions of time, referred to as stochastic processes. A stochastic process can be viewed as a family of random variables. When a structure is subjected to a random loading, based on the stresses developed in the structure and failure criteria the failure probability can be estimated. In practice the structures are designed with higher factor of safety to take care of such random loads. In such cases the structure will fail only when the random loads are cyclic in nature. In traditional reliability analysis, the variation in the load is treated as a random variable and to account for the number of occurrences of the loading the concept of extreme value theory is used. But with this method one is neglecting the damage accumulation that will take place from one loading to another loading. Hence, in this paper, a new way of dealing with these types of problems has been discussed by using the concept of stochastic fatigue loading. The random loading has been considered as earthquake loading. The methodology has been demonstrated with a case study on nuclear power plant piping.