Inclusion of Manufacturing Induced Uncertainties into Linear Vibration of Structures

Owing to manufacturing, composite materials and others can show considerable uncertainties in wall-thickness, fluctuations in material properties and other parameters, which are spatially distributed over the structure. These uncertainties have a random character and they cannot be reduced by mesh refinement within the finite element (FE) model. So what we need is a suitable statistical approach to describe the parameter changing that holds for the statistics of the process and the correlation between the parameter spatially distributed over the structure. The paper presents a solution for a spatial correlated simulation of parameter distribution owing to the manufacturing process or other causes that is suitable to be included in the finite element analysis (FEA). The spatial variation of parameters is modelled using variogram approach and it has been applied into FEA. For example the effect of spatial variation of thickness and the effect of spatial variation of material properties has been studied in this part of work. The effect of thickness on buckling has been also studied. The results could be used to asses the robustness of the structure and to get limits for manufacturing induced uncertainties. (© 2005 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)