Wind loads used in current design standards do not account for various sources of uncertainties, such as wind tunnel records, climatological data, and surface roughness length. This simplified characterization may yield inaccurate wind effects and, as a result, unsatisfactory estimates of the performance of buildings subjected to wind loads. This award will overcome limitations of current standards by developing a practical computational framework for wind design, based on climatological data, wind tunnel records, and rigorous probabilistic/statistical concepts. The framework will quantify the uncertainties in wind loads by probabilistic models, propagate these uncertainties into wind effects by efficient computational methods, and develop design conditions which view buildings as systems rather than collections of independent components. The research will be complemented by an educational program involving course development, graduate and undergraduate researchers, and presentations at national and international conferences. The computational framework will be shared with the NSF-supported Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure, Computational Modeling and Simulation Center, as a module for wind design. This research will contribute to NSF's role in the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program.
This project will develop a computational framework that constitutes a new paradigm in wind engineering. The framework will map climatological and wind tunnel data into system reliability estimates for buildings subjected to wind loads by accounting for the mechanical and aerodynamic characteristics of these buildings. The system reliability methodology for wind design will be based on: (1) novel probabilistic models for wind loads whose samples and realizations, rather than just their mean and correlation functions, will be statistically consistent with wind tunnel time histories, (2) new efficient methods for calculating wind effect samples from wind load samples in linear/nonlinear structures subjected to stationary/nonstationary, Gaussian/non-Gaussian wind loads, and (3) system reliability estimates of structural performance that, unlike current approaches that check ultimate/serviceability limit states member-by-member, will consider these limit states simultaneously at all structural members. The format of the ultimate/serviceability criteria will be similar to that of current standards.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
