Structural Reliability Analysis and Prediction (Civil Engineering S.)

Rating:
Summary: An excellent textbook!
Review: I bought this book (at Amazon.com) to get a better understanding on the basic principles of structural reliability assessment (I 'm concerned with the probabilistic estimation of the remaining life of pressurized pipelines containing active corrosion defects in oil and gas distribution pipeline networks in Mexico). This thorough, well organized, volume is in my opinion the most comprehensive treatment available nowadays. It is mainly devoted to the probabilistic structural safety analysis and includes both theoretical foundations and practical examples in a coherent and logical presentation. It follows a clear step by step scheme (a quite useful feature for newcomers) covering basic issues such as measures of structural reliability and more complex and advanced topics including time dependent reliability and resistance and load modeling. The book also contains a brief on probabilistic theory which I've found very useful as a quick (and refreshing) guide. For newcomers, the first two chapters are essential to understand the subject. The author devotes the core of the book to a rigorous, detailed discussion of methods to compute probability of failure in engineering structures with simple and complex (multiple) limit state functions (and their evolution with time). The Monte Carlo integration approach, the first order methods FOM and the first order second moment methods FOSM are reviewed in detail and practical aspects of their computational implementations are given. It is to underline the excellent discussions given of limit state functions in load-resistance space which allow to clearly understand the procedures and strategies used by the above mentioned reliability methods to compute checking points, safety index and probability of failure. The last part of the book is devoted to load and resistance modeling, codes of structural reliability and probabilistic evaluation of existing structures. Civil engineers will profit this part as I did because of the lack of reliable data on load and resistance structural parameters variability (in many fields, plausible probabilistic methods can be only achieved by judiciously assuming or modeling load and resistance fluctuations, so that these chapter are welcome). This book cover this subject in some detail, emphasizing in steel and concrete members. The probabilistic reliability assessment of existing structures, the latest subject covered by the book is useful in pointing out the necessity of appropriate repairs actions on such structures, how to estimate deterioration and which actions have to be carried out in order to reduce risk levels. Some drawbacks have to be mentioned: (i) practical examples are scarce in key sections such as 1.5.3 (generalized reliability problem formulation), 1.5.4 (conditional reliability problems) and 6.6.3 (FOSM/FOR methods for unconditional failure probability), (ii) the level of abstract thinking required to understand many aspects covered by the book could result quite demanding for newcomers or readers that do not master probabilistic theory, (iii) mathematical details given for the FOSM algorithm are rather cumbersome and only two references to practical computational implementations of this method are given. As a matter of fact, I've preferred and used a practical implementation of this method published by M. Ahammed and R. E. Melchers (the author) in Engineering Structures(Vol. 17, No. 2, page. 74), and (v) I've noted some typographical errors (for example, constant b4 used in expression A.59 must be negative valued -see the book by Abramowitz, pag. 239 ). In spite of these drawbacks, I strongly recommend this book for those people concerned with the subject, especially newcomers, I repeat, this is the best available textbook in the market