Reliability approach on impacted composite materials for railways

Abstract

This paper deals with a reliability approach applied on composite plates which should be used in railway structures under low velocity impact loading.Impacted composite plates in bending configuration are considered as an application of the reliability approach to composite materials. Mass of projectile, height of fall and distance between supports are the three variables considered. A limit state function G is defined by the impact force compared to a critical one. Using reliability approach, the reliability indexallows to estimate the probability of failurePf. It is then assessed for several values of the critical force using Monte Carlo direct method and First Order Reliability Method (FORM) approximated method. For FORM method, genetic algorithms are investigated to obtain the best reliability index. Results obtained by the approximated FORM method are finally discussed and compared to Monte Carlo simulations considered as a reference .