An efficient analysis procedure has been developed for the random vibration analysis of nonlinear structures subjected to nonstationary random excitations based on the equivalent linearization method and the time-domain explicit formulation method. When the equivalent linearization method is used for the nonstationary random vibration analysis of a nonlinear structural system, equivalent linear systems are constructed for different time instants and the analysis problem is transformed to a series of analyses of these linear systems. Because a large number of linear analyses must be conducted to get reliable results for the original nonlinear system, efficiency of the analysis algorithm for the linear analysis is crucial for its successful application. The time-domain explicit formulation method, recently proposed for the nonstationary random vibration analysis of linear systems, has much higher computational efficiency than other methods owing to the use of explicit expressions of dynamic response...

The response surface Monte Carlo method (RSMCM) is proposed for reliability analysis of aerostatic response and aerostatic stability for different types of long-span bridges, in which the nonlinear effects due to geometric nonlinearity and deformation-dependent aerostatic loads are taken into consideration. The geometric parameters, the material parameters, and the aerostatic coefficients of the bridge girder are regarded as random variables in the proposed method. RSMCM has higher accuracy in comparison with the traditional response surface method and requires much less computational cost than the conventional Monte Carlo method. The proposed method is applied to reliability analysis of aerostatic response and aerostatic stability of the Hong Kong Ting Kau Bridge, and reasonable results illustrating effectiveness of the method are obtained.