Sensitivity Study on Durability Variables of Marine Concrete Structures

In order to study the influence of parameters on durability of marine concrete structures, the parameter＇s sensitivity analysis was studied in this paper. With the Fick＇s 2nd law of diffusion and the deterministic sensitivity analysis method （DSA）, the sensitivity factors of apparent surface chloride content, apparent chloride diffusion coefficient and its time dependent attenuation factor were analyzed. The results of the analysis show that the impact of design variables on concrete durability was different. The values of sensitivity factor of chloride diffusion coefficient and its time dependent attenuation factor were higher than others. Relative less error in chloride diffusion coefficient and its time dependent attenuation coefficient induces a bigger error in concrete durability design and life prediction. According to probability sensitivity analysis （PSA）, the influence of mean value and variance of concrete durability design variables on the durability failure probability was studied. The results of the study provide quantitative measures of the importance of concrete durability design and life prediction variables. It was concluded that the chloride diffusion coefficient and its time dependent attenuation factor have more influence on the reliability of marine concrete structural durability. In durability design and life prediction of marine concrete structures, it was very important to reduce the measure and statistic error of durability design variables.

Regional moment-independent sensitivity analysis with its applications in engineering

Traditional Global Sensitivity Analysis（GSA） focuses on ranking inputs according to their contributions to the output uncertainty.However,information about how the specific regions inside an input affect the output is beyond the traditional GSA techniques.To fully address this issue,in this work,two regional moment-independent importance measures,Regional Importance Measure based on Probability Density Function（RIMPDF） and Regional Importance Measure based on Cumulative Distribution Function（RIMCDF）,are introduced to find out the contributions of specific regions of an input to the whole output distribution.The two regional importance measures prove to be reasonable supplements of the traditional GSA techniques.The ideas of RIMPDF and RIMCDF are applied in two engineering examples to demonstrate that the regional moment-independent importance analysis can add more information concerning the contributions of model inputs.