Level Excursion Analysis of Probabilistic Quasibrittle Fracture
Jia-Liang Le
Civil, Environmental, and Geo- Engineering, University of Minnesota
ABSTRACT: It is widely acknowledged that no structure can be designed to be risk free, and therefore, reliability analysis plays a central role in the design of engineering structures. The recent focus has been placed on structures made of brittle heterogenous (a.k.a. quasibrittle) materials, such as ceramics, composites, concrete, and many more at the microscale. Le and his team recently developed a level excursion model for analyzing the probabilistic failure of quasibrittle structures, in which the structural failure probability is calculated as a first passage probability. The main feature of the model is that it captures both the spatial randomness of local material resistance and the random stress field induced by microstructures. The model represents a continuum generalization of the classical weakest-link model, which recovers the Weibull distribution as an asymptotic distribution function. In this talk, Le discusses two applications of this model.