The Reliability Analysis of an Underwater Vehicle Model Based on Natural Frequency

Finite element simulation is widely used in the ship industry, but its reliability has yet to be investigated. In this paper, a method is proposed to judge the reliability of the underwater vehicle model according to whether the experiment results are within the predicted ranges obtained from the finite element model or not. Based on the model updating and validation methods, the response surface model that takes vibration frequency of the underwater vehicle as responses is established； then, the interval estimation and the probability density function of the first four mode frequencies are predicted via Monte Carlo simulation and kernel density estimation. The reliability of the underwater vehicle finite element is validated by comparing experiment results with the interval estimate.