Extreme events, whether manmade or natural, are rarely occurring events that fail the structural system in a catastrophic manner. The design goal for extreme events is not to preserve the system, but to preserve human life. A high-speed car crash is a good example of an extreme event: the car will be scrapped, but a well-designed car allows the occupants to walk away. Indeed, the car is sacrificed by design to reduce the load on the occupants to survivable levels. Designing for extreme events presents several challenges. By their very nature, such events are rare, and therefore difficult to characterize. The amplitudes of the loads are frequently stochastic, and may span orders of magnitude. Choosing the appropriate design case is therefore crucial, and requires an understanding of the available resources and human needs. A 5 mph crash is trivial and a 50 mph crash is frequently fatal. While a 150 mph crash may be survivable in a F-1 racecar, few drivers can afford a million dollar car or would tolerate wearing a five-point safety harness during daily driving. The stochastic nature of extreme events requires a broad range of scenarios to be evaluated to produce a robust structural system. Fast, reasonably accurate simplified analysis tools are necessary to analyze the broad spectrum of possible extreme events, with high precision simulation tools available to analyze the events identified as the most critical. The complexity of extreme events requires sophisticated pre- and post-processing. Even a preliminary design analysis of a new car uses over one million elements, with the precise positioning of fifth, fiftieth, and ninety-fifth percentile occupants inside. The enormous volume of numbers of generated by even a simple analysis requires visualization. Printed output is largely superfluous in finite element analysis today. Structures that are successful during extreme events are not passive structures, but smart structures with embedded sensors that send data to computers that choose appropriate strategies for reacting to immediate events. For example, at low velocities, airbags are not deployed in car crashes to prevent minor injuries, such as left wrist fractures for the driver, while at higher velocities, they are deployed to mitigate major injuries. Similarly, we can envision smart buildings that use structural health sensors and computers to optimally choose evacuation routes for building occupants. The workshop will focus on the following areas: • Advanced immersive technologies for pre- and post-processing of analyses. • Advanced high-resolution simulation methods. • The linkage of geometry between design and analysis. • Stochastic methods and data mining for design and analysis. • Simplified models for robust design. • Smart structure technologies. Link to the workshop poster Workshop Program | 
