Modeling of structural patterns with uncertainties.

The paper deals with the modeling of structural patterns characterized by unilateral conditions when some uncertainty occurs. This is the case, for example, when an elastic beam lies on a rigid soil whose profile is unknown and needs some modeling through the recourse to a random process. The topic has been previously treated by the authors and the present paper refers to the developed researches, addressing the case of beams discretized into a number of finite beam-elements, and assuming as significant only the ordinates of the soil profile under the nodal points. Energetic properties of the solution are demonstrated to hold, which are shown to represent the premise for the whole treatment, since they allow to set the fundamental complementarity relation ruling the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]