GOALI/Collaborative Research: Advancing System Reliability with Application to Light-Framed Structures

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This collaborative Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) project seeks transformation of structural design practice for buildings from one based on the safety and reliability of the individual pieces (components) of a building to one based on the safety and reliability of building's structural systems: roof, walls, and floors. This change in design practice has the potential to lead to both safer and more economically efficient buildings. Buildings framed from cold-formed steel are targeted for initial application. The industry partner, the American Iron and Steel Institute, is a consortium of the nation's steel producers and spearheads the development of codes and standards for buildings designed from cold-formed steel. The industry partner will work directly with the academic research team to insure that industry is utilizing the latest research findings in system reliability, and to insure the research has maximum impact on the practical design of cold-formed steel buildings. The research combines new analytical models for system reliability, with new frameworks for implementing reliability in building design, along with a series of physical tests on cold-formed steel framed walls, floors, and roof trusses - all specifically design to demonstrate how component and system reliability of buildings interact.The principal goal of this research is to provide a path to transformation of structural design from a component-based process to a system-based process that can be made accessible to design engineers through design code modifications, but which is based on rigorous analysis. Specific research objectives are: (1) enumeration of a general system-subsystem-component hierarchy; (2) development of a subsystem-component reliability procedure supported by experiments and high fidelity simulations; and (3) application of subsystem dependent component reliabilities for codes and standards. The projected solution will identify the primary subsystems that make up a structural system and then employ optimization to define appropriate component reliabilities to ensure a target system reliability and favorable failure mode. Novel reliability-sensitivity analysis and structural simulation enable the optimization engine. The research objectives will be integrated with educational and outreach initiatives, including regular meetings with an Industry Advisory Board.