Metamodeling of nonlinear structural systems with parametric uncertainty subject to stochastic dynamic excitation

Within the context of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), it is often the case that structural systems are described by uncertainty, both with respect to their parameters and the characteristics of the input loads. For the purposes of system identification, efficient modeling procedures are of the essence for a fast and reliable computation of structural response while taking these uncertainties into account. In this work, a reduced order metamodeling framework is introduced for the challenging case of nonlinear structural systems subjected to earthquake excitation. The introduced metamodeling method is based on Nonlinear AutoRegressive models with eXogenous input (NARX), able to describe nonlinear dynamics, which are moreover characterized by random parameters utilized for the description of the uncertainty propagation. These random parameters, which include characteristics of the input excitation, are expanded onto a suitably defined finite-dimensional Polynomial Chaos (PC) basis and thus the resulting representation is fully described through a small number of deterministic coefficients of projection. The effectiveness of the proposed PC-NARX method is illustrated through its implementation on the metamodeling of a five-storey shear frame model paradigm for response in the region of plasticity, i.e., outside the commonly addressed linear elastic region. The added contribution of the introduced scheme is the ability of the proposed methodology to incorporate uncertainty into the simulation. The results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methodology for accurate prediction and simulation of the numerical model dynamics with a vast reduction of the required computational toll.