A progressive collapse occurs in a building when a local failure spreads to the rest of the structure. Typically, these collapses lead to severe human and material losses. Current design philosophies to address this problem involve ensuring adequate continuity by means of tying systems. Although these solutions have proven to be effective in many extreme situations, they can increase the risk of progressive collapse in certain scenarios.
Thanks to funding from the European Research Council (ERC), the Endure project aims to overcome these limitations by developing a novel design approach based on the segmentation of buildings using structural fuses. These structural fuses will provide continuity between building segments for normal or small failures but will separate when failure propagation is inevitable.
We are currently working on the first Work Package (WP1) of the project, which is mainly concerned with the development of novel methodologies for (1) identifying buildings in which segmentation would be advantageous, (2) structural robustness design using segmentation, and (3) the positioning of fuses. The methodologies being developed will involve a risk-based evaluation of robustness which considers the probability of different events and their associated consequences.
