Reliability Computations for Rigid Plastic Frames with General Yield Conditions

Abstract

The topic is reliability analysis of frame structures with rigid-ideal plastic constitutive behavior assigned to discretized hinge models. General yield conditions with internal force interaction are considered. Adoption of the associated flow rule assures the validity of the static theorem. On this basis a theorem about linear combinations of so-called linearly associated lower bound safety margins proves useful for setting up a strategy of fast identification of important collapse mechanisms. They are important in the sense of close upper bounding of the reliability against collapse.