Reliability-Based Plastic Limit Analysis of Plane Frames

Resumo

In engineering, the possibility to simulate the structural behavior using computers has been extremely
useful to guarantee safety and economic projects, as well as to evaluate the integrity of structures. The growing
demands for evaluation of structural safety have led to the development of new analysis methods, structural design
and verification. With that in mind, it is proposed in this paper a methodology for determining the collapse load
for plane frame structures using plastic limit analysis and reliability analysis. The problem formulation is obtained
using the plasticity limit theorems, which allow the limit analysis to be written in the form of linear programming.
The reliability analysis is performed using the Monte Carlo method. For the implementation of the algorithms
involved in the methodology, the Python programming language was used. A graphical user interface was
developed to allow the structural modeling in a very intuitive and dynamic way. It is expected that the tools
developed in this research can be used in further research involving computational simulations of real engineering
problems.