Uncovering Potential Risks of Wind-induced Cascading Damages to Construction Projects and Neighboring Communities

非结构化建筑工地，包括不完整的结构和不安全的资源(如材料、设备和临时设施)，是最容易受到飓风等风暴影响的环境之一。风对建筑工地的破坏会造成巨大的损失、干扰和相当大的工期延误，从而对建筑工程的效率产生负面影响。此外，来自建筑工地的设备、材料或结构构件等引起的风致破坏对邻近社区造成负面影响，引发结构破坏、重伤和人员伤亡以及经济损失。该项目将创建和验证新的简化成像到模拟框架，以防止风灾事件对建筑项目和邻近社区造成灾难性破坏。这个项目将使我们的社会受益，因为它将大大加强目前的防暴和减灾计划，这些计划最终将促进公共安全、减少财产损失、降低保险成本，并引发备灾文化。这项多学科研究将通过综合研究和教学活动，帮助新一代年轻人更广泛地参与科学、技术、工程和数学(STEM)领域。该项目将利用通过极端风事件实验测试获得的潜在危险建筑资源的知识，通过使用从建筑工人和配备摄像头的无人机获得的多模式视觉数据，通过机器视觉技术部分或完全自动模拟建筑工地的当前状态。为了对非结构化建筑工地中的多个离散对象进行多物理模拟，提出了一种基于脉冲的离散元方法。这种方法通过实现有效的计算，显式地考虑了基于脉冲的动力学，从而能够在显著的加速和合理的模拟逼真度之间取得平衡。该方法可以描述相互作用的组件随时间的集体运动。然后，将使用3D建筑或民用信息模型(BIM/CIMS)进行基于组件的脆弱性和影响分析，以生成有关风致破坏机制的基本和高度具体的知识。最后，整个系统将在真实世界的建筑项目中进行验证，并在一个12风扇的风墙设施中进行验证，该设施可以产生高达5级的飓风风速。

Unstructured construction sites, including incomplete structures and unsecured resources (e.g., materials, equipment, and temporary facilities), are among the most vulnerable environments to windstorms such as hurricanes. Wind-induced damages to construction sites cause substantial losses, disruption, and considerable schedule delays, and thus negatively impact the efficiency of construction projects. Moreover, wind-induced damage caused by equipment, materials or structural elements, for example, originating from construction sites negatively affect neighboring communities, triggering structural damage, serious injuries, and casualties, as well as economic losses. This project will create and validate a new streamlined Imaging-to-Simulation framework to prevent wind hazard events from causing catastrophic damage to construction projects and neighboring communities. This project will benefit our society as it will significantly enhance current windstorm preparedness and mitigation plans, which ultimately promote public safety, property loss reduction, insurance cost reduction, and induce a culture of preparedness for disasters. This multidisciplinary research will help broaden participation of a new generation of young people in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields through integrated research and pedagogical activities.Using knowledge on potential at-risk construction resources obtained through experimental testing of extreme wind events, this project will partially or fully automatically model the current state of construction sites through machine vision techniques using multimodal visual data obtained from construction workers and camera-equipped unmanned aerial vehicles. To perform multi-physics simulation of multiple discrete objects in unstructured construction sites, an impulse-based discrete element method will be conceptualized. This method explicitly accounts for impulse-based dynamics by realizing efficient computing, which enable balancing between significant speed-up and reasonable simulation fidelity. The approach can describe the collective motion of mutually interacting components over time. Component-based vulnerability and impact analysis with 3D Building or Civil Information Models (BIM/CIMs) will then be conducted to generate fundamental and highly specific knowledge on wind-induced damage mechanisms. Finally, the entire system will be validated in real-world construction projects and within a 12-fan Wall of Wind facility that can generate up to hurricane category 5 wind speeds.