Optimal life-cycle mitigation of fatigue failure risk for structural systems
研究了通过增加设计疲劳容量和更频繁的检查维护来降低结构系统疲劳失效风险的最优组合，发现高组件可靠性设计配合较少检查更经济，且设计标准的最低要求需足够冗余才有效。
Fatigue failure risk can be mitigated both by increasing the design fatigue capacity of the structural components and by conducting more frequent inspection and maintenance actions. The optimal combination of these two types of safety measure is structure dependent. It depends, among others, on the relative cost of the safety measures, the consequences of failure, the level of redundancy, the number of deteriorating components and the statistical dependence among components. In this article, a generic system representation is used to parametrise deteriorating structures according to these system characteristics. Based on this system representation, we investigate patterns of optimal life-cycle fatigue mitigation and provide recommendations for fatigue design. Results show that it can be cost-efficient to achieve system-level safety requirements with high component reliabilities at design and less frequent inspections. Furthermore, we show that the minimum requirements for fatigue design that are typically prescribed in design standards to avoid the need for inspections are not enough unless sufficient redundancy is ensured.