SIMULATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL LOADS

Abstract

In a developing country like ours, many important engineering projects are in various stages of planning, design and execution. To adequately design a structure it is necessary to study the response of the structural system subjected to loads that are expected to occur in the life time of the structure. It may not always be possible to obtain a loading history of the system under consideration, or, available records, in the past may be too short to predict safely the excitation that the proposed structure is supposed to attract. Tlius the need for the creation of some artificial (simulated) loading process-history, that is a true representation of the system, arises. Furthermore, complex loading processes are generally studied neglecting so many non—linear and uncertain factorsthat could cause significant deviation from the physical process itself. In these cases the simulation of the process may be useful to retain higher order terms and inherent non—linearity.