Collaborative Research: A Holistic Performance-Based Design Framework for Water, Debris, Pressure and Drift Induced Losses of Buildings under Winds

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Severe wind storms represent one of the most destructive and costly phenomena that impact communities within the United States. Such storms can cause significant direct and indirect losses incurred by communities each year. Wind storm damage mitigation can be achieved by providing an alternative to current design practice through the introduction of loss estimation methodologies for wind-excited buildings that fully embrace the principles of modern performance-based design (PBD). PBD may not only provide new tools that can advance design practices from the limitations of prescriptive codes, but may also enable the rational and holistic performance assessment of a wide class of existing and new buildings under winds through performance metrics that directly promote community resiliency. The goal of this project is to develop a state-of-the-art holistic PBD framework for a wide class of low- to mid-rise buildings sensitive to wind. The framework will focus on the rational determination of the direct and indirect losses caused, for example, by damages sustained to the cladding, internal partitions and ceilings due to water ingress, and debris impact and excessive net pressure acting on the building envelope, as well as damages and losses due to excessive drift or acceleration of the main wind force resisting system of the building. Performance will be expressed through a concise set of system-level decision variables, e.g., expected system-level annual repair costs and downtime that are easily understood by decision-makers and/or stakeholders of diverse technical backgrounds. The framework will be initiated by time-dependent extratropical storm and hurricane models that will include the effects of uncertainties. In order to consistently describe the damages and losses outlined above, specific models will be developed for rigorously describing pressure-induced damage to building envelopes through the use of wind tunnel measured pressure databases. These models will be complemented through the definition of probabilistic models for describing water-induced internal damage and losses, as well as building envelope damage and losses due to excessive pressure and debris impact. The integration of these models can lead to a design framework that will enable a new generation of safer and more economic buildings subject to wind hazards.