Reliability-based inspection planning of the ship structure exposed to fatigue damages

Abstract

Reliability-based inspection planning is one of the most popular methods in determining the time of inspection and repairs in various structures. In this way, inspection and repair times are determined mainly by putting a lower limit for the reliability index. The detection and measurement of cracks is one of the possible outputs at the time of inspecting fatigue cracking. One way to use this output is to update the parameters of the fatigue reliability equation. In this study, statistical distribution of the parameters of the problem is updated and fatigue reliability is calculated for inspection planning using the Bayesian updating concept through the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method and the Metropolis–Hasting algorithm. The distribution of crack growth equation material parameters and the initial crack length will be updated with this method. The application of the proposed method has been shown in a structural member of a ship.