Inspired by the way in which some lizards protect themselves from predators by releasing their tails when attacked, researchers at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) have devised a new building design method that significantly reduces the risk of a catastrophic collapse.
Current building design methods are primarily based on improving the connectivity between components of the structure. In the event of component failure, this connectivity allows the loads that were carried by failed components to be redistributed to the rest of the structural system.
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While these methods are effective after small initial failures, they can increase the risk of progressive collapse after large initial failures, leading to complete or large-scale collapses. This happened, for example, in the case of Champlain Towers in Miami in 2021, during the collapse of a three-storey apartment building in the Spanish coastal town of Peñíscola the same year, and in the case of the Metropol, a ten-story residential and commercial building in Abadan, Iran, that collapsed while under construction in 2022. These are the type of incidents that are prevented by the approach proposed by the UPV researchers.
‘Our novel design method provides a solution to overcome this alarming limitation and achieve more resilient buildings, able to isolate a collapse only to the part of the structure that has suffered the initial failure and safeguarding the rest of the building,’ said Jose M Adam, a UPV professor and member of the Concrete Science and Technology Institute (ICITECH). ‘The new design method has been validated with a test on a real-scale building. It is therefore the first solution against collapse propagation in buildings after large initial failures that has been tested and verified at full scale. The application of the new design method will prevent catastrophic collapses, thus protecting human lives and minimising economic losses.
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The principle of the method developed by the UPV team lies in using the concept of a structural fuse, which makes it possible to isolate damaged parts of a building to prevent the propagation of major failures throughout the entire construction.
‘This new philosophy is similar to protecting an electrical system against overloads by connecting different grid components through electrical fuses. says Nirvan Makoond, a postdoctoral researcher at ICITECH. ‘With our designs, the building has structural continuity under normal operating conditions but is segmented when the failure propagation is inevitable, thus reducing the extent of damages and preventing total collapse.’
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‘The implementation of the method will only have a minor or even negligible impact on the cost of the structure, as it uses conventional construction details and materials,’ said Andri Setiawan, a postdoctoral researcher at ICITECH.
In its current state of development, the researchers’ new design approach can be practically applied to any new building. ‘Its effectiveness has been verified and demonstrated for a full-scale building specimen made of prefabricated concrete. We are currently working on extending the methodology to buildings constructed with in-situ concrete and steel,’ concluded Manuel Buitrago, a senior researcher at ICITECH.
The development of this new design method forms part of the Endure project, funded by the European Research Council. It was within the framework of this project that a world-first test was carried out in June 2023 to validate its performance. The tests were carried out on a complete full-scale building, in which a large initial failure in the structure was isolated in one part of the building, preventing its propagation to the entire structure.
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The research has been published in Nature.