Towards resilient structures

Abstract

A disaster is an adverse event resulting from natural processes of the Earth or sometimes from terrorist attacks. Since the concept of disaster resilience has become prominent, research and practice for making the cities resilient play an important role in urban management. Cities are composed of a variety of structures and providing the structural resiliency can protect them. Resilient structures are composed of a number of ideal performance criteria, which based on analysis, experiment, and past experience, are capable to withstand the required level of stress and deformation. In addition, durability, re resistance, and other capabilities, such as being environmentally friendly with no considerable reduction in functionality, are some of their other characteristics. In this paper, according to various design needs of structures, major in fluencing parameters are introduced in order to attain resiliency. Even though not all structures can be managed to be totally resilient, in other words to resist all types of action situations, the trend is to provide as many functions as possible. For example, not all structures can be designed to withstand wind, earthquake, and explosion. Generally, structures may be designed and built for a certain kind of actions. In the end, general considerations will be demonstrated to provide structures with speci c criteria for resiliency.