Reliability-based design optimization of an imperfect submarine pressure hull
Résumé
Reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) has gained much attention in the past fifteen years as a way of introducing robustness in the process of designing structures and systems in an optimal manner. Indeed classical optimization (e.g. minimize some cost under mechanical constraints) usually leads to solutions that lie at the boundary of the admissible domain, and that are consequently rather sensitive to uncertainty in the design parameters. In contrast, RBDO aims at designing the system in a robust way by minimizing some cost function under reliability constraints. Thus RBDO methods have to mix optimization algorithms together with reliability calculations. The classical approach known as "double-loop" consists in nesting the computation of the failure probability with respect to the current design within the optimization loop. It is not applicable to industrial models (e.g. finite element models) due to the associated computational burden. In contrast, methods based on the approximation of the reliability (e.g. FORM) may not be applicable to real-world problems. In this context, an original method has been developed that tries to circumvent the abovementioned drawbacks of the existing approaches. It is based on the adaptive construction of a meta-model for the expensive-to-evaluate mechanical model, and on the subset simulation technique for the efficient and accurate computation of the failure probability and its sensitivities with respect to the design variables. The proposed methodology is briefly described in this paper before it is applied to the reliability-based design of an imperfect submarine pressure hull.