Assessment of characteristic values of the ultimate strength of corroded steel plates with initial imperfections

The ultimate strength of a corroded steel plate with random initial distortions and random material and geometrical properties predicted by semi-empirical design equations or by means of non-linear Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is adopted as a case study to demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed approach. The percentiles of the ultimate strength of the plates calculated using these simplified approaches are compared with the ones obtained by Monte Carlo simulation.