This work deals with important challenge on quantifying durability, life-time integrity and safety against failure of heterogeneous composite structures under extreme conditions. Special attention is given to massive structures, with the main obstacle to overcome pertaining to our inability to certify the structural safety by performing real-size and real-time experiments, either due to excessive structure size, or to excessive cost due to irreplaceable structure component.
We would like to improve the currently dominant experimental approach for proof of structure safety and thus accelerate innovations in this domain. More precisely, we propose the state-of-the-art advances in computational methods that can be brought to bear upon this class of problems, providing the full understanding of the potential failure modes of the given system, along with a very detailed simulation of extreme conditions brought by man-made and natural hazards. We seek further developments in recently proposed approach to coupled mechanics-probability computations that can be successfully used to provide a detailed interpretation of structure tests under heterogeneous stress field and to identify both model parameters and their probability distribution. Finally, we propose to use such a combined approach with probability computations for uncertainty propagation, which can offer a clear explanation of the size effect influence on dominant failure modes of massive composite structures.