Reliability-based design of unstiffened panels for ship structures

The main objective of structural design is to insure safety, function, and performance of an engineering system for target reliability levels and for specified time period. As this must be accomplished under conditions of uncertainty, probabilistic analyses are necessary in the development of such probability-based design of unstiffened panels for ship structures. The load and resistance factor design (LRFD) format was developed in this paper for unstiffened panels. Partial safety factors were determined to account for the uncertainties in strength and load effects. In developing these factors, Monte Carlo simulation was utilized to assess the probabilistic characteristics of strength models by generating basic random variables that define the strength and substituting them in these models; and the first-order reliability method (FORM) was used to determine the partial safety factors based on prescribed probabilistic characteristics of load effects. Also, strength factors were computed for a set of load factors to meet a target reliability level.