The building designed to limit catastrophe

Catastrophic building collapse can have many causes, but the outcome is all too familiar; a loss of lives and the destruction of infrastructure that can have a long lasting effect on a community.

Current guidelines suggest extensive structural connectivity within a building is the best way to prevent disaster. This allows for a redistribution of weight should part of a structure be damaged. But in certain circumstances, this interconnectedness can be a building’s downfall. With a large enough initial failure, collapsing parts of the building can pull down the rest of the connected structure.

Read the paper: Arresting failure propagation in buildings through collapse isolation

So this team of researchers took a new approach, focusing not only on preventing collapse, but also managing failure if it happens. Their idea is inspired by how some lizards shed their tails to escape being eaten by a predator – a tactical sacrifice.

They call it hierarchy-based collapse isolation, and they tested their theory using an experiment two storeys high.

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