ROBUSTNESS-ORIENTED DESIGN OF A PANEL-BASED SHELTER SYSTEM IN CRITICAL SITES

The paper deals with the design and off-site construction of particular buildings for critical and emergency situations (like natural disasters such as hurricanes, landslides, floods and earthquakes, war sites and desert areas), where challenging requirements have to be fulfilled. The panel-based system of ES-KO corporation, which is a major player in this peculiar market, is described both from the architectural and the engineering points of view. Beyond the classical advantages of off-site systems like, e.g., lightness and ease of assembly, speed of construction, transportation and modularity, specific capacity-design rules can provide high standards of safety durability and structural robustness. Many of these rules can be found in Nature, like exo-skeletons, parallelization, redundancy and compartmentalization. These design issues permit to face particular situations like settlements, strong wind and earthquakes and explosions, by exploiting particular strategies not commonly envisaged in structural design. Moreover, durability ensures the possibility to re-use the modules in different places, reducing the environmental footprint and costs. After describing the architectural modular design of panel-based buildings, which is itself oriented to raise structural performances, an overview of the modern robustness-oriented structural design phylosophy is put forward, and its application to ES-KO panels is briefly outlined.