Reliability of imperfection-sensitive composite shells via the Koiter-Cohen criterion

The reliability of imperfection-sensitive shells is derived within the Koiter-Cohen modified criterion for anisotropic materials. While previous works on this problem considered mainly the effect of the initial imperfection, the authors of this work investigated recently the additional contribution of the loading randomness. Here, we also consider the randomness of the system in the reliability derivation. That is, randomness associated with the material, the geometry, the boundary conditions and the manufacturing uncertainties. The various numerical results, obtained within the Hasofer-Lind method, indicate the great importance of the system randomness, implying major variations in the reliability with respect to the traditional derivations. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Limited.