Steady creep bending in a beam with random material parameters

A statistical analysis is presented for steady creep bending in a beam, where the material parameters are random processes along the neutral axis arising from random fluctuations in temperature and imperfection density. Analytical and numerical results are presented for the statistical properties of the normal stress and lateral velocity. It is found that whereas the normal stress shows very little random fluctuation the lateral velocity is highly random. The statistics of the lateral velocity generally show a significant dependence on the nominal value of the creep power and on the position along the neutral axis.