Resilience in Mechanical Engineering - A Concept for Controlling Uncertainty during Design, Production and Usage Phase of Load-Carrying Structures

Abstract

Resilience as a concept has found its way into different disciplines to describe the ability of an individual or system to withstand and adapt to changes in its environment. In this paper, we provide an overview of the concept in different communities and extend it to the area of mechanical engineering. Furthermore, we present metrics to measure resilience in technical systems and illustrate them by applying them to load-carrying structures. By giving application examples from the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 805, we show how the concept of resilience can be used to control uncertainty during different stages of product life.

Optimal Booster Station Design and Operation under Uncertain Load

“…The higher this value, the larger the system's performance range, cf. [20], and thus its resilience.…”

“…The margin of a technical system describes how close to its performance boundary the system is currently operating, cf. [20]. In our context, the system's margin is given by the distance of the actual operation points in the different scenarios to the maximum operating point possible.…”

Analysis and Synthesis of Resilient Load-Carrying Systems

“…The concrete behaviour of resilient load-carrying systems has been defined by Altherr et al (2018) as a working definition: 'A resilient [load-carrying] technical system guarantees a predetermined minimum of functional performance even in the event of disturbances or failure of system components, and a subsequent possibility of recovering at least the set point function.' (Altherr et al, 2018) The previously mentioned principles are commonly used for safety-systems like run-flat tyres. The expounded theoretical contents of the paper will be explained using the example of the run-flat tyre and a special snow chain system in chapter 5.…”

“…Concepts for measuring resilience qualitatively and quantitatively already exist though the concepts do not apply for load-carrying systems in particular (Florin andLinkov, 2016, Ganin et al, 2016). Altherr et al developed a set of metrics concerning resilient systems' characteristics especially of load-carrying systems (Altherr et al, 2018, Hosseini et al, 2016. The resilience characteristics are illustrated and visualised by plotting the functional performance as a function of the influencing factors in Figure 2.…”

“…Resilience capabilities are represented by four metrics characterising the curve progress of the graph. The margin describes how precarious the system operates with respect to a kind of performance boundary which is shown by the distance between the design point performance and the minimum functional performance min f (Altherr et al, 2018. Resilient systems are characterised by the range of influencing factors in which the system is able to perform without total breakdown also referred to as loss of integrity.…”