Research on an Optimized Evaluation Method of the Bearing Capacity of Reinforced Concrete Beam Based on the Bayesian Theory

Materials (Basel). 2023 Mar 21;16(6):2489. doi: 10.3390/ma16062489.

Abstract

An optimized evaluation method of the bearing capacity of reinforced concrete beam based on the Bayesian theory was proposed in this paper. This evaluation method optimized the traditional Markov Chain-Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling method, and proposed an improved Metropolis-Hastings (MH) sampling method and a transitive MCMC (TMCMC) sampling method based on the MCMC theory. These two derived sampling methods solved the problem that the traditional MCMC algorithm makes it difficult to achieve convergence when the number of modified parameters is large. Therefore, on the basis of obtaining the measured sample information and the prior information of uncertain parameters, this paper first used multiple "model components" to form a model sample, then carried out a sensitivity analysis based on the relevant response indicators and selected the key parameters that had a great impact on the bearing capacity, carried out static load tests, and extracted and analyzed the experimental data. Then, based on a large amount of analysis data, the improved MH sampling method and TMCMC sampling method were used to establish a posterior probability distribution database. Finally, multiple posterior probability distributions were used to identify and predict the bearing capacity. The results showed that the method was feasible and effective for the evaluation of the bearing capacity of reinforced concrete beam.

Keywords: Bayesian theory; MCMC sampling method; MH sampling method; bearing capacity; evaluation method; reinforced concrete beam.