Managing interactions, general considerations

Risk analysts expend effort, often at considerable expense, to determine the likelihood of die final triggers of hazardous events. They address equipment failure and sometimes operator error they address the hazards arising from unintended interactions of system components, even when no failure occurs but they do not address the failure of management systems and, in general, the influence of management on functional risk. With respect to safety, the resulting analyses must be optimistic. 

In Section 2.5, the application of adaptive fiber composites to influence the behavior of helicopter rotor blades is outlined. To simulate such a system, an adaptive beam, as considered in the two previous chapters, needs to be examined in the rotating environment. Besides the already complicated interactions due to arbitrary mechanical and electromechanical couplings, this requires consideration of additional couplings due to gyroscopic and second-order theory effects. Consequently, the general problem may only be solved with the aid of discretization, to be accomphshed here by means of the finite element method. Analytic solutions of manageable complexity, however, may be found for simplified problems and can be utilized for fundamental studies and to support the validation of the finite element solution. 

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