Refined probabilistic response and seismic reliability evaluation of high-rise reinforced concrete structures via physically driven dimension-reduced probability density evolution equation

Dynamic reliability evaluation of large-scale reinforced concrete (RC) structures is one of the most challenging problems in engineering practices. Although extensive endeavors have been devoted to mechanical analysis of concrete structures in the past decades, it was recognized that the randomness from both structural parameters and excitations have significant effects on the dynamic behaviors of structures with complex nonlinearity, damage, energy dissipation, and plasticity. Thus, great difficulty exists in evaluating the nonlinear stochastic responses and dynamic reliability of the real-world complex structures of large degrees of freedom. In the present paper, a physically driven method for refined probabilistic response and seismic reliability evaluation of real-world RC structures is proposed via synthesis of the refined mechanical analysis and the physically-based uncertainty propagation. In this method, the material parameters can be treated as probabilistically dependent random variables characterized by vine copulas, and the ground motion is modeled by non-stationary Clough-Penzien spectrum. The uncertainty propagation of arbitrary response quantity(-ies) of interest is governed by the dimension-reduced probability density evolution equation (DR-PDEE). The intrinsic drift coefficients in the DR-PDEE are the physically driven force for the uncertainty propagation and can be identified via data from representative dynamic analyses of the structure. The time-variant reliability of the structures can be captured by solving the physically driven DR-PDEE, which cannot be achieved by the general Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) due to the prohabitively large computational cost. Finally, a practical engineering application is shown in this paper for the probabilistic response and seismic reliability evaluation of a 24-story RC shear wall structure with nearly 280,000 degrees of freedom (DOFs).