Risk Analysis of Structures in Presence of Stochastic Fields of Deterioration: Flowchart for Coupling Inspection Results and Structural Reliability

Inspection by non-destructive testing techniques of existing structures is not perfect and it has become a common practice to model their reliability in terms of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. This paper suggests a method of building ROC curves in case of random fields of defects on a structure by using polynomial chaos decomposition. Knowledge of spatial distribution of defects allows a reliability analysis to be performed. When selecting stochastic finite element analysis to solve this problem, the format is the same as the one chosen for modelling inspections results. The paper shows how to link these quantities (ie. reliability and inspection results) in a risk analysis by using polynomial chaos decomposition as a common language.