About
With the increase in complexity of chemical plants and increase in the difficulty of predicting potential failures, the desire to design systems resilient to potential faults has increased. It is critical to understand the resilience of engineered systems, especially those that support the critical infrastructure of the nation, across all engineering and design disciplines (Mitchell and Mannan, 2005). While research has been performed to increase the resiliency of specific systems, the concept of resiliency as a property of a system has yet to be explored.
This research focuses on understanding the underlying relationship of modes and causes of failures and developing techniques that apply to many types of systems, structures, and products. We propose to equate the resiliency of a system to a well-established concept, the resiliency of a materialAlso, systems may fail due to lack of resilience of one component of the system. The unified approach to physics developed by Schmid and Fuchs will be used to establish a simplified overall energy balance for system in terms of characteristic “substance-like” quantities. The final agreed upon correlations will be applied to various equipment, units, and processes to aid in the development of tools and heuristics that can be used to improve the resiliency of chemical processes.
