Many major breakthroughs in history have been caused by occurrence and development of events by chance in a beneficial way. In other words, the research focus was different but an apparent failure turned out to be a breakthrough in other applications.
Is this the case today and are there examples from your own research?
Should this be a motivation for reporting unsuccessful outcomes?
Dear Professor Fosso:
This is a very interesting question and one, which I must admit, has come to mind occasionally, even though I never expressed it as eloquently as you have. In a recent experimental investigation, my group and I were investigating the performance of full-scale reinforced concrete columns subjected to catastrophic earthquake loading. We stumbled upon a distress/damage mode which, in retrospect, should have been obvious but which had previously not been identified in the technical literature. It concerns the buckling of longitudinal bars in concrete columns such that the buckling displacements are parallel to the faces of the column, and therefore parallel to the legs of the column ties. One of the ironies here is that the column ties are supposed to suppress bar buckling, but they are effective only for outward buckling (i.e. perpendicular to the column face and column ties).
I have attached a couple of papers that describe this phenomenon. If I can think of any others, I will contact you subsequently.
Respectfully,
Arturo E. Schultz
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