Simulation-Based Analysis for Structural Reliability of the Crane Rail Beam Under Stochastic Crane Movements and Irradiation Conditions

This study presents a simulation-based approach to investigate the effects of stochastic crane movements on the structural reliability of the rail beam under radiation conditions. The rail beam is discretized into 47 equispaced structural points for strain profile calculation caused by a stochastically moving crane. The Normal distribution, Uniform distribution and 3-parameter Log-normal distributions are applied to describe the stochastic crane distances, respectively. The reliability at each structural point of the rail beam is defined with respect to the emergence of irradiation creep, which is calculated based on the accumulated strain over a given period of time. And the reliability of the rail beam is then determined by the minimum reliability calculated at different structural points, according to the weakest link principle. As shown by simulation results, the rail beam reliability degrades with the most rapid rate when the crane distances follow a Normal distribution, rather than the other two distributions. This offers a possible way to improve the reliability of the rail beam by avoiding clustered movements of the crane around the middle of the rail beam.