Monte-Carlo simulation-based analysis for structural reliability of the crane rail beam under stochastic crane movements and irradiation conditions

This study presents a Monte-Carlo simulation-based approach to investigate how stochastic crane movements affect the structural reliability of the rail beam considering radiation effects. In the simulation, the rail beam loaded under a stochastically moving crane is discretized into 47 equispaced structural points for calculating its strain profile. Then the structural reliability at each structural point is calculated with the consideration of irradiation creep, represented as an accumulated strain over a given period of time. And the rail beam reliability is determined by the minimum value from the reliabilities calculated at different structural points, according to the weakest link principle. In our simulations, three candidate distributions, including the normal distribution, uniform distribution, and 3-parameter lognormal distributions respectively, are applied to describe the stochastic distances of the crane. It can be seen from the simulation results that the rail beam reliability degrades with the most rapid rate when the crane distances follow a normal distribution, compared to the other two distributions. This paper offers a possible way of using the proposed Monte-Carlo simulation-based method to carry out reliability analysis and improvements for the rail beam working in extreme environments, such as irradiation conditions, with random operational tasks.