The work we carry out with the Endure Project has been published in Nature and is featured on its cover.
The paper “Arresting failure propagation in buildings through collapse isolation” is published in Open Access. You can download it for free here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07268-5.
This is the first time Nature has published a paper on building design and construction. We are very happy with this achievement.
The paper describes a novel design approach to arrest collapse propagation in buildings. The approach is inspired by how lizards shed their tails to escape predators. It combines two seemingly opposing concepts, continuity and segmentation, to improve the robustness of building structures. During operational conditions or small initial failures, the design approach ensures sufficient continuity to redistribute the loads from the failed elements to their surroundings, preventing any collapse. However, when a larger initial failure occurs that may lead to collapse propagation, the structural system separates into different parts and isolates the collapse, hence protecting the rest of the system. We validated the effectiveness of the approach through unique experimental tests on a purposely built full-scale precast building specimen that was subjected to both small and large initial failures. Besides, using advanced computational simulations, we also demonstrated that the same large initial failure scenario would lead to total collapse of the test building if increased connectivity was adopted as recommended by present guidelines. We hope that the results of this study will pave the way for a new paradigm of robustness design, leading to more resilient buildings and to a more resilient society.
Apart from the article, the following research content can be accessed:
- Methods Section
- Extended Data (8 additional figures and 2 tables)
- Source Data
- Supplementary Videos (6 videos)
- Supplementary Information: Report elaborating in detail the experimental campaign
- Peer review files: Peer reviewer reports and response to reviewers’ comments
All this information and data allows other researchers to replicate our work and use our data for their research.
In addition to the article, Nature has published a 4-minute video that shows our work which you can see using the link below.
We acknowledge the assistance of the following colleagues from the ICITECH-UPV institute in preparing and executing the full-scale building tests: Juan José Moragues, Pedro Calderón, Daniel Tasquer Val, Giacomo Caredda, Diego Fernando Cetina Berdugo, Maria Luz Gerbaudo, Lorenzo Marín Vilches, Marina Oliver Cano and Geovanny Sempértegui. We are also grateful to the Levantina, Ingeniería y Construcción company for providing human resources and access to their facilities for testing. We thank Ayman ElFouly and Applied Science International, LLC – ASI for their support in performing simulations.
This investigation is part of the Endure project, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 1101000396).
