Resilience: How it Can Be Applied in Mechanical Engineering?

 Resilience is a term that has grown in popularity over the past decade, having found its way into the sociological lexicon of those promoting human development, mostly due to the “Great Recession” having done so much damage to so many people. But this article isn’t based on people, this is how concepts of resilience can be applied to mechanical engineering, specifically in regards to load bearing structures in this case.

But, wait...what is resilience?

Figure 1. Definition of Resilience from Dictionary.com

To paraphrase Dictionary.com, resilience is being able to recover after trauma, change or adversity. When it comes to load bearing structures, this could pertain to physical onslaught such as elemental or man related factors, product failure due to manufacturing flaws or degradation with age and myriad other factors. 

So how is this done? By factoring in issues of uncertainty within design, and increasing resilience by “adjusting the system state via monitoring, responding, learning, and/or anticipating, as well as by systematically designing the system topology.” (Altherr et al., 2018) Designs that are “safe-to-fail”, anticipate the failure and design it to be non-catastrophic, also preparing a response that allows structure recovery to be efficient.

Through these four core functions of resilience consisting of  monitoring, responding, learning and/or anticipating, systems with greater resilience may be developed, and according to Altherr et al. (2018) mathematical optimization can be applied to systematically build resilient topologies.

  Yet, that’s not where it ends, dear readers.  Metrics must be established to measure resilience, be it quantitatively, qualitatively, or both. Not only that, but these metrics must be applied to technical systems in order to be applicable to real-world designs. The original text lists a compilation of various resilience metrics important for calculating and applying more resilient factors into the structures carrying loads, with no one metric being suitable as a blanket option for every use or variable. Some of these metrics may not be applicable to all designs, but taking them into account, regardless, aids the anticipation phase of the core functions, covering more bases than may seem necessary in order to maintain a resilient structure through redundancy.

In essence, when the four resilient core functions of monitoring, responding, learning and/or anticipating are each applied to each of the four core properties of resilience which are robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, and rapidity, resilience of load bearing structures has the potential to increase substantially. Not only can designs of these systems improve, but with that comes technological advancements in materials that make the anticipation factor even more easy to, well, anticipate. These processes don’t have to be designated only to load bearing structures, either. The concept is somewhat universal, if one knows how to translate the logic to their applications.

Check out the full text here for deeper information too technical for to get into in this blog post: https://www.scientific.net/AMM.885.187.pdf

 

Works Cited

Altherr, L. C., Brötz, N., Dietrich, I., Gally, T., Geßner, F., Kloberdanz, H., Leise, P., Pelz, P. F., Schlemmer, P. D., & Schmitt, A. (2018). Resilience in mechanical engineering - a concept for controlling uncertainty during design, production and usage phase of load-carrying structures. Applied Mechanics and Materials, 885, 187–198. https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/amm.885.187 

Dictionary.com. (n.d.). Resilience definition & meaning. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 20, 2021, from https://www.dictionary.com/browse/resilience.