Reliability Assessment of an Existing Offshore Steel Structure with Hot Spots

摘要

In offshore steel structures engineers often face the problem of assessing the criticality of existing hot spots to predict the remaining lifetime and thus to develop sound reliability-based inspection programs. One problem with such an approach is that the past fatigue conditions cannot be appropriately modeled, and the degree to which damage has accumulated in hot spot areas cannot be consistently modeled. This paper shows a practical methodology for predicting the remaining fatigue life of hot spots by using a probabilistic fracture mechanics approach and shows how in general the results can be used in reliability-based inspection programs.