Combining the advantages of the stratified sampling and the importance sampling, a stratified importance sampling method （SISM） is presented to analyze the reliability sensitivity for structure with multiple failure modes. In the presented method, the variable space is divided into several disjoint subspace by n-dimensional coordinate planes at the mean point of the random vec- tor, and the importance sampling functions in the subspaces are constructed by keeping the sampling center at the mean point and augmenting the standard deviation by a factor of 2. The sample size generated from the importance sampling function in each subspace is determined by the contribution of the subspace to the reliability sensitivity, which can be estimated by iterative simulation in the sampling process. The formulae of the reliability sensitivity estimation, the variance and the coefficient of variation are derived for the presented SISM. Comparing with the Monte Carlo method, the stratified sampling method and the importance sampling method, the presented SISM has wider applicability and higher calculation efficiency, which is demonstrated by numerical examples. Finally, the reliability sensitivity analysis of flap structure is illustrated that the SISM can be applied to engineering structure.
The improved line sampling （LS） technique, an effective numerical simulation method, is employed to analyze the probabilistic characteristics and reliability sensitivity of flutter with random structural parameter in transonic flow. The improved LS technique is a novel methodology for reliability and sensitivity analysis of high dimensionality and low probability problem with implicit limit state function, and it does not require any approximating surrogate of the implicit limit state equation. The improved LS is used to estimate the flutter reliability and the sensitivity of a two-dimensional wing, in which some structural properties, such as frequency, parameters of gravity center and mass ratio, are considered as random variables. Computational fluid dynamics （CFD） based unsteady aerodynamic reduced order model （ROM） method is used to construct the aerodynamic state equations. Coupling structural state equations with aerodynamic state equations, the safety margin of flutter is founded by using the critical velocity of flutter. The results show that the improved LS technique can effectively decrease the computational cost in the random uncertainty analysis of flutter. The reliability sensitivity, defined by the partial derivative of the failure probability with respect to the distribution parameter of random variable, can help to identify the important parameters and guide the structural optimization design.
