Biomimicry is a technique that inspired solutions to engineering problems through the study of natural systems, designs and processes. Recently, the engineering Biomimicry technique has been used to inspire a protection system against the blast waves and that can mitigate, absorb, and reflect the blast waves. Hence, this work studies the effect of different geometrical configurations of concrete wall barriers inspired by nature against blast waves. The non-linear 3d numerical model is used to model the proposed configurations. The finite element modeling is validated with referenced experimental works. The response of the proposed structural configurations of the wall barrier is analyzed. The results showed that the new bio-inspired pyramidical structure configuration (PCBW) has a notable effect on the mitigation of blast hazards which gave the best performance for the protection of the area behind the wall barrier with 19.5% with respect to traditional concrete barrier wall (TCBW). Also, it is concluded that nature inspiration has a great effect on designing new protection systems against the effect of blast waves.

Tuned liquid damper (TLD) is a type of tuned mass damper (TMD) where the mass is supplanted by a liquid (usually water). In this paper, performance of TLD that reduces the displacement and acceleration resulting from wind and earthquake lateral forces in tall buildings is studied. Experimental works have been conducted on three 10 stories steel building models with scale of 1/25 with and without water tanks. A dynamic ramp wave force with frequency of 1.5 Hz and amplitude of 2 mm is applied on each model using a horizontal shaking table. The results of the accelerometers and linear variable differential transformers (LVDTs) installed at the tenth floor of the models are recorded. It was found that the 8%, 15% and 11.5% weight of water tank to weights of structures can minimize the acceleration response and top floor displacement for the three tested models by 23 %, 48% and 18.2%, respectively. Also, the calculated damping ratio for model 2 is 1.9 %.