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A numerical approach is proposed in this paper for safety assessment of mechanical structures with agerelated degradation. Deterioration occurs in mechanical structures due to various environmental attacks and operation conditions which leads to changes in structural performance and structural resistance capacity. By combining techniques such as degradation evaluation methods, damage mechanics, and the finite element method, the proposed numerical method can be used to analyse the responses and damages of mechanical structures with age-related degradation. Ageing degradation effects can be taken into account by introducing degradation factor into formulations of finite element method and damage mechanics. The numerical results for a notched bar and a plate with a central hole are provided to validate the proposed numerical method.

In this paper, a numerical method for the analysis of smart structures with uncertainties involved in the material parameters is presented. This method combines the finite element technique, concepts of fuzzy sets and optimization. For the optimization of fuzzy parameters, a sensitivity index is proposed. The sensitivity analysis based on the proposed sensitivity index can be effectively used to reduce the number of variables to be fuzzified and thus reducing the computational efforts considerably.