Publications

Dynamic thermography is a promising technology for inspecting metallic and composite structures used in high-consequence industries. However, the reliability and inspection sensitivity of this technology has historically been limited by the need for extensive operator experience and the use of human judgment and visual acuity to detect flaws in the large volume of infrared image data collected. To overcome these limitations new automated data analysis algorithms and software is needed. The primary objectives of this research effort were to develop a data processing methodology that is tied to the underlying physics, which reduces or removes the data interpretation requirements, and which eliminates the need to look at significant numbers of data frames to determine if a flaw is present. Considering the strengths and weakness of previous research efforts, this research elected to couple both the temporal and spatial attributes of the surface temperature. Of the possible algorithms investigated, the best performing was a radiance weighted root mean square Laplacian metric that included a multiplicative surface effect correction factor and a novel spatio-temporal parametric model for data smoothing. This metric demonstrated the potential for detecting flaws smaller than 0.075 inch in inspection areas on the order of one square foot. Included in this report is the development of a thermal imaging model, a weighted least squares thermal data smoothing algorithm, simulation and experimental flaw detection results, and an overview of the ATAC (Automated Thermal Analysis Code) software that was developed to analyze thermal inspection data.

This report describes the underlying principles and goals of the Sandia ASCI Verification and Validation Program Validation Metrics Project. It also gives a technical description of two case studies, one in structural dynamics and the other in thermomechanics, that serve to focus the technical work of the project in Fiscal Year 2001.

Shock excitations are normally random process realizations, and most of our efforts to represent them either directly or indirectly reflect this fact. The most common indirect representation of shock sources is the shock response spectrum. It seeks to establish the damage-causing potential of random shocks in terms of responses excited in linear, single-degree-of-freedom systems. This paper shows that shock sources can be represented directly by developing the probabilistic and statistical structure that underlies the random shock source. Confidence bounds on process statistics and probabilities of specific excitation levels can be established from the model. Some numerical examples are presented.

One of the key elements of the Stochastic Finite Element Method, namely the polynomial chaos expansion, has been utilized in a nonlinear shock and vibration application. As a result, the computed response was expressed as a random process, which is an approximation to the true solution process, and can be thought of as a generalization to solutions given as statistics only. This approximation to the response process was then used to derive an analytically-based design specification for component shock response that guarantees a balanced level of marginal reliability. Hence, this analytically-based reference SRS might lead to an improvement over the somewhat ad hoc test-based reference in the sense that it will not exhibit regions of conservativeness. nor lead to overtesting of the design.

Abstract not provided.

Most mechanical and structural failures can be formulated as first passage problems. The traditional approach to first passage analysis models barrier crossings as Poisson events. The crossing rate is established and used in the Poisson framework to approximate the no-crossing probability. While this approach is accurate in a number of situations, it is desirable to develop analysis alternatives for those situations where traditional analysis is less accurate and situations where it is difficult to estimate parameters of the traditional approach. This paper develops an efficient simulation approach to first passage failure analysis. It is based on simulation of segments of complex random processes with the Karhunen-Loeve expansion, use of these simulations to estimate the parameters of a Markov chain, and use of the Markov chain to estimate the probability of first passage failure. Some numerical examples are presented.

Abstract not provided.

In the current study, the generality of the key underpinnings of the Stochastic Finite Element (SFEM) method is exploited in a nonlinear shock and vibration application where parametric uncertainty enters through random variables with probabilistic descriptions assumed to be known. The system output is represented as a vector containing Shock Response Spectrum (SRS) data at a predetermined number of frequency points. In contrast to many reliability-based methods, the goal of the current approach is to provide a means to address more general (vector) output entities, to provide this output as a random process, and to assess characteristics of the response which allow one to avoid issues of statistical dependence among its vector components.

The canonical variate analysis technique is used in this investigation, along with a data transformation algorithm, to identify a system in a transform space. The transformation algorithm involves the preprocessing of measured excitation/response data with a zero-memory-nonlinear transform, specifically, the Rosenblatt transform. This transform approximately maps the measured excitation and response data from its own space into the space of uncorrelated, standard normal random variates. Following this transform, it is appropriate to model the excitation/response relation as linear since Gaussian inputs excite Gaussian responses in linear structures. The linear model is identified in the transform space using the canonical variate analysis approach, and system responses in the original space are predicted using inverse Rosenblatt transformation. An example is presented.