A novel structural safety assessment method of large liquid tank based on the belief rule base and finite element method

The structural safety assessment of large liquid tanks (LLT) has attracted an extensive attention. As a typical gray box model, the belief rule base (BRB) model can handle qualitative information and quantitative data simultaneously, which is a suitable modeling tool for structural safety assessment. However, it is difficult to establish and train the BRB model when there is a lack of expert experience and fault samples of LLT. Therefore, a novel safety assessment model for LLT based on BRB and finite element method (FEM-BRB) is proposed in this paper. The FEM is introduced to construct the BRB model by combining expert knowledge and industry standards for the first time, which can effectively compensate for the lack of expert experience. The fault samples are generated in the mechanism simulation model under different working conditions. Based on the fault samples generated by the FEM and historical samples, the projection covariance matrix adaption evolution strategy (P-CMA-ES) optimization algorithm is then used to train the model, which further improves the structural safety assessment accuracy when lacking fault samples. A case study of three actual oil tanks in a coastal port is conducted to illustrate the effectiveness and advantage of the developed structural safety assessment method.