Robustness-oriented design of a panel-based shelter system in critical sites

This paper deals with the design and off-site construction of particular buildings for critical and emergency situations (e.g., natural disasters such as hurricanes, landslides, floods, and earthquakes; war sites; and desert areas), in which challenging requirements have to be fulfilled. The panel-based system of the ES-KO corporation, which is a major player in this particular market, is described from both the architectural and the engineering points of view. Beyond the classical advantages of off-site systems (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, such as exoskeletons, parallelization, redundancy, and compartmentalization. These design issues are suited to particular situations, such as settlements, strong wind, earthquakes, and explosions, because they exploit particular strategies not commonly envisaged in structural design. Moreover, durability ensures the possibility of reusing 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 performance, an overview of the modern robustness-oriented structural design philosophy is put forward, and its application to ES-KO panels is briefly outlined.