ABSTRACT
CH A P T E R 17 Wave Propagation in Uncertain Waveguides
In the last few years, we have witnessed a large improvement in new materials research. As a result, there is a rapid growth in the use of lighter materials in aerospace and other major industries. These materials show significant variation in material properties and as a result, created a situation wherein understanding of a variety of structural problems becomes very difficult, and the uncertainties in these properties play a major part in their design. Uncertainties may exist in the characteristics of the structure itself and in the environment to which the structure is exposed. The lack of good knowledge of material properties and their behavior can be categorized as the first type of uncertainty. The other type of uncertainty is due to the change in the load and support condition with the change in environmental variables such as temperature and pressure. Another important aspect, while considering the source of uncertainties, is the modeling technique. In this context, when the variability is large, we can find in the literature that probabilistic models are more advantageous than deterministic ones. In probabilistic methods, uncertainty in the parameters is considered and is represented by a random variable or a random field. The development in the field of digital computers has revolutionized the status of research in this area. In many cases of structural design, with the availability of computational tools such as Monte Carlo simulation [MCS], uncertain analysis is incorporated in the design phase of the structures. The main difficulty involved in modeling uncertain wave propagation analysis is the computational expense needed for the analysis. Here, in this work, the method of MCS is coupled with SFEM models to perform uncertain wave propagation analysis.
