What if a building could automatically disconnect its damaged sections to prevent a local failure from turning into a catastrophic collapse? Scientists have developed a promising new structural design that could make this possible. By introducing specially designed structural fuses, researchers have found a way to control how buildings respond to extreme damage, potentially preventing one collapsing section from dragging down an entire structure.
Building collapses are among the most devastating engineering failures. They can cause enormous loss of life, destroy valuable infrastructure, and leave communities struggling for years. In many cases, the biggest danger does not come from the initial damage itself but from what happens afterward. When one part of a building fails, the resulting forces can spread to neighbouring components, triggering a chain reaction known as progressive collapse.
Now, a research team led by Andri Setiawan has proposed an innovative approach that could help stop this dangerous chain reaction. Their solution uses specially designed force-regulating devices, called structural fuses, to selectively disconnect parts of a building when collapse begins to spread.
Why Can One Small Failure Destroy an Entire Building?
Modern buildings are designed to withstand different types of loads, including the weight of people, furniture, equipment, strong winds, and earthquakes. Engineers also include additional safety measures to ensure that a building can survive certain unexpected forms of damage.
One important strategy is to create strong connections between different structural components. This property is known as structural continuity.
In simple terms, continuity allows different parts of a building to work together. If a column or another supporting component fails, the surrounding structure can redistribute its load through alternative pathways. This helps prevent the entire building from collapsing because of one damaged component.
However, there is a hidden problem.
When the initial damage becomes extremely large, the same strong connections that normally protect a building can make the situation worse. A collapsing section may remain connected to neighbouring sections and pull them down as it falls.
This can create a chain reaction in which one failure triggers several others, eventually causing a much larger collapse.
The researchers compare this situation to mountain climbers connected by a rope. If one climber slips slightly, the rope can help prevent a fall. But if several climbers fall together, their combined weight may pull others down as well.
Buildings can experience a similar problem when structural connections allow a local collapse to spread horizontally.
The 1968 Building Collapse That Changed Structural Engineering
The importance of structural continuity became widely recognised after the 1968 Ronan Point disaster in London.
A gas explosion on the 18th floor of the residential tower damaged a small section of the building. However, the damage quickly spread, causing an entire corner of the tower to collapse.
The incident demonstrated how a relatively local failure could trigger a much larger disaster when different structural components were not sufficiently connected.
Following this tragedy, engineers increasingly focused on improving structural continuity. Building designs began incorporating stronger connections and alternative load paths so that forces could move around damaged components.
These improvements helped make buildings more resistant to local failures.
However, researchers now recognise that simply increasing continuity may not be enough. In certain extreme situations, too much continuity can allow a collapse to spread rather than stop it.
A New Idea: Buildings That Can Disconnect Their Damaged Sections
The research team wanted to solve this problem by combining two important properties: structural continuity and controlled separation.
The basic idea is simple. A building should remain strongly connected during normal conditions and ordinary emergencies. However, if a major structural failure occurs and collapse becomes unavoidable, the building should be capable of separating specific sections to prevent the damage from spreading.
To achieve this, the researchers developed specially designed structural fuses.
These devices work somewhat like electrical fuses.
An electrical fuse allows current to flow normally but interrupts the circuit when the current becomes dangerously high. Similarly, the proposed structural fuses allow building components to remain connected under normal loading conditions but enable controlled separation when forces reach a predefined critical level.
The purpose is not to weaken the building or make it easier to collapse. Instead, the fuses are designed to activate only when maintaining the connection could cause a much larger structural failure.
By disconnecting selected structural connections, the system can isolate the damaged section and protect the remaining parts of the building.
How Do Structural Fuses Work?
The proposed system is particularly important for buildings made using cast-in-place reinforced concrete.
In this construction method, concrete is poured into formwork at the building site, creating structural components that are strongly connected to one another. This provides excellent structural efficiency, flexibility, and strength.
However, these distributed connections also make it difficult to separate different sections once the structure has been completed.
The researchers addressed this challenge by developing force-regulating fuses that can be incorporated into the structural system.
These fuses establish predefined separation boundaries within a building. Under ordinary conditions, they maintain the required connections and allow the structure to behave as a unified system.
If an extreme event causes a major failure, the fuses can regulate the forces transmitted across these boundaries. Once the relevant activation conditions are reached, they allow the connections to disengage in a controlled manner.
This prevents a collapsing section from continuously pulling neighbouring structural elements into the failure.
Importantly, the researchers designed the approach so that the segmentation mechanism would not undermine the building's ability to resist everyday lateral forces, including those produced by earthquakes and strong winds.
Testing an Entire Building Without Building One
Developing a new safety mechanism is only part of the challenge. Engineers must also demonstrate that it works under realistic conditions.
Testing the progressive collapse of a complete building is extremely expensive and requires substantial laboratory space, equipment, materials, and time.
Existing experimental methods generally focus on understanding how structures redistribute loads after individual components fail. However, these methods are not necessarily suitable for evaluating systems designed to separate different building sections.
To overcome this limitation, Setiawan and his colleagues developed a new experimental testing procedure.
Instead of constructing and testing an entire building, they designed a representative structural subassembly. This smaller section reproduces the important structural behaviour needed to investigate how collapse spreads through a larger building.
Using this approach, researchers can study the interaction between structural components, observe how forces move through the system, and determine whether the proposed fuses can successfully isolate a collapsing section.
The team used this experimental method to demonstrate that the proposed solution could prevent collapse propagation under extreme scenarios.
The approach also makes future research more affordable and accessible because many structural engineering laboratories already have equipment that could be adapted for these experiments.
Could This Technology Make Future Buildings Safer?
The findings could have important implications for the future of structural engineering.
Buildings are expected to remain in service for decades, during which they may experience unexpected events. These include severe weather, accidental impacts, explosions, overloading, material deterioration, and other hazards that may not be fully anticipated during the design process.
Traditional building codes provide important safety requirements, but no design can predict every possible combination of damage and loading.
The proposed structural fuse system could provide an additional layer of protection by controlling how damage spreads after an initial failure.
It may be particularly useful in highly connected reinforced concrete buildings, where creating separate structural sections is otherwise challenging.
The researchers' approach also offers a potentially cost-effective way to investigate new collapse-prevention technologies without repeatedly testing complete buildings.
However, the technology still has limitations.
The current approach is primarily designed to prevent horizontal collapse propagation. Its effectiveness against other failure mechanisms, such as vertical pancake collapses, requires further investigation.
Additionally, the forces that activate structural fuses depend on several factors, including building geometry, construction materials, structural design, and the nature of the extreme event.
Engineers must also carefully evaluate how the fuses behave under high-speed impacts, explosions, and repeated loading to ensure that they do not activate when they should remain connected.
A New Direction for Disaster-Resistant Buildings
The research introduces an important change in how engineers think about building safety.
For decades, structural robustness has largely focused on making buildings more connected so that loads can be redistributed when individual components fail. The new approach suggests that buildings may also need the ability to disconnect selected sections when maintaining those connections becomes dangerous.
Rather than choosing between strong connections and structural separation, future buildings could combine both.
By using force-regulating structural fuses, engineers may be able to create structures that remain connected during normal conditions but can isolate severe damage before it spreads across the entire building.
Although further research and real-world engineering validation are needed, this approach could open a promising new direction for designing safer, more resilient, and resource-efficient buildings that are better prepared for unforeseen disasters.
Reference: Setiawan, A., Cetina, D., Gerbaudo, M.L. et al. Breaking continuity to prevent catastrophic building collapse. Nat Commun 17, 7546 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-74393-2
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