Interval Limit Analysis of Rigid Perfectly Plastic Structures

This article presents a novel extended limit analysis approach that determines the sharp maximum and minimum bounds on the collapse load of rigid perfectly plastic structures simultaneously subject to uncertain but bounded loading magnitudes and plastic material capacities. The governing formulation is cast as a linear programming problem with interval coefficients. Linearity is achieved by a suitable piecewise linearization of nonlinear yield surfaces. The proposed algorithm is founded on a characteristic formula concept and an appropriate interval arithmetic interpretation to transform the interval limit analysis problem into two deterministic linear programming problems that can be solved by any available linear programming solver. (C) 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.