Performance-based design (PBD) is fast becoming the benchmark approach for achieving designs that rationally meet society?s need for a truly safe built environment. While the principles of PBD have been vigorously adopted in the field of earthquake engineering with the aim of increasing public safety through the promotion of innovation in design, the same cannot be said for wind engineering, which has remained a strongly prescriptive discipline of civil engineering. There therefore exists the need to define appropriate frameworks that allow the principles of PBD to be fully embraced during the design of buildings to resist severe wind events, e.g. hurricanes. The development of such frameworks would give designers of new buildings and retrofitters of existing buildings a means to not only rationally assess the performance of wind excited buildings, but also communicate their results in terms that decision-makers and/or stakeholders can easily understand.

In response to this challenge, this project resulted in the development of a new generation of holistic PBD frameworks for wind excited buildings that promise to usher in a new era in performance-based wind engineering. One of the fundamental contributions of the frameworks developed during this project is their capability to provide an integrated and holistic means to determine the damage to the structural system (also known as the main wind force resisting system) and non-structural system (e.g. the cladding, internal partitions, ceilings) of buildings subject to severe winds. Through the advancement in the modeling of extreme wind environments associated with hurricanes and of wind fragility analysis, the frameworks enable the estimation of damage to isolated buildings, or clusters of buildings, in urban settings, caused by debris impact, water ingress, excessive net pressure acting on the building envelope and excessive building movement due to the action of winds. New methodologies were also introduced for the systematic, robust and efficient treatment of the inevitable uncertainty that affects all aspects of assessing the performance of buildings against extreme natural hazards. Metrics specific to the performance assessment of buildings subject to severe winds, e.g. hurricanes, were introduced for communicating performance in ways that can be easily understood by a wide class of technical and non-technical decision-makers and/or stakeholders. Through the application of the framework to carefully designed archetype buildings, fundamental insight into the modeling of hurricane hazards and the performance of typical engineered multi-story to high-rise buildings was created. New knowledge on the interdependence of damage to the structural and envelope systems was created. This knowledge has the potential to provide key support for increasing the resilience of engineered buildings to hurricanes. During the project, the frameworks were also extended for the estimation of the resilience of residential communities subject to hurricanes and concurrent rainfall. New metrics were introduced that provide an understanding of community resilience while accounting for inherent uncertainty. The project also provided new insight into the effects of debris on the performance of residential communities subject to hurricane winds.          

The proposed models, observations and frameworks will enhance the competitiveness of the building design industry and result not only in a new generation of safer and more efficient buildings, but also in advances in both national and international building provisions on wind engineering. The performance-based wind engineering frameworks developed during the project promise to usher in a new and holistic approach to the design of multi-story to high-rise buildings against severe winds.  

Last Modified: 01/10/2021
Modified by: Ahsan Kareem