Effect of multiple uncertain material properties on the response variability of in-plane and plate structures (Q2384216)

In the majority of research works on stochastic finite element analysis, the main concern is put on the effect of uncertain elastic modulus on the response variability. This is mainly due to the importance of this parameter in the stochastic response of structures, but also due to the difficulties in introducing other material and/or geometrical uncertain parameters in the stochastic formulation. In this paper, a formulation is presented in the framework of the weighted integral method in order to determine the response variability of in-plane and plate structures with multiple uncertain material parameters, i.e. the elastic modulus and Poisson's ratio. To accomplish this, use is made of the general equation for \(n\)th joint moment and a polynomial expansion of the coefficients of constitutive matrix. For computational purposes, the infinite series of stochastic sub-stiffness matrices is truncated preserving sufficient accuracy. To demonstrate the validity of the proposed formulation, various numerical examples for in-plane and plate structures are provided, and the results are compared with preceding research results and also with those obtained by classical Monte Carlo simulation combined with the local average scheme. The agreement is in general good, and the proposed approach appears to be a promising one.