International Journal of Stochastic Analysis
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 249201, 14 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/249201
Research Article

Application of Stochastic Sensitivity Analysis to Integrated Force Method

1Mechanical Engineering Department, The University of Akron, OH 44325, USA
2Ohio Aerospace Institute, Cleveland, OH 44135, USA

Received 18 February 2012; Accepted 18 April 2012

Academic Editor: Josefa Linares-Perez

Copyright © 2012 X. F. Wei and S. N. Patnaik. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

As a new formulation in structural analysis, Integrated Force Method has been successfully applied to many structures for civil, mechanical, and aerospace engineering due to the accurate estimate of forces in computation. Right now, it is being further extended to the probabilistic domain. For the assessment of uncertainty effect in system optimization and identification, the probabilistic sensitivity analysis of IFM was further investigated in this study. A set of stochastic sensitivity analysis formulation of Integrated Force Method was developed using the perturbation method. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate its application. Its efficiency and accuracy were also substantiated with direct Monte Carlo simulations and the reliability-based sensitivity method. The numerical algorithm was shown to be readily adaptable to the existing program since the models of stochastic finite element and stochastic design sensitivity are almost identical.