Resilient Engineered Systems

With the increase in complexity of engineered systems and the increasing difficulty of predicting potential failures, the desire to design systems resilient to potential faults has increased. The added threat of terrorism has also increased the difficulty of planning for unanticipated events. Therefore, it is important to develop resilient systems - systems that can withstand unanticipated failures without disastrous consequences.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 established. This research seeks to equate the resiliency of a system to a well-established concept: the resiliency of a material. Like a material, the resiliency of a system can be defined as the total amount of energy it can store before the system fails. The energy input into each system as well as the system’s energy potential, or exergy, will be used to develop correlations to determine the resiliency of different systems.These system 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. This approach will allow the determination of aspects of different systems that lack resilience and will allow future system designers to improve overall system resilience by focusing on the identified areas.