Collaborative Research: Assessment of Building Resiliency in Tornadoes Considering Transient Internal Pressure Effects

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Buildings that serve as essential facilities to communities must remain operational after natural disasters, including tornadoes, to provide vital services and reduce recovery time. A frequent cause for building failures in tornadoes has been the sudden occurrence of large openings in the building envelope, such as when overhead vehicular doors are breached due to debris impact. These sudden breaches create sudden changes in the internal pressure of the building which, in turn, yield additional structural effects. But there has not been much research on these sorts of pressure changes to date. This Disaster Resilience Research Grants (DRRG) project will quantify transient internal pressures and the effects of changes in order to improve assessment of likely building performance in tornadoes. Findings will contribute significantly to the development of codes and standards for tornado-resistant building design, including critical infrastructures and other types of buildings. In addition, the data from the research will be curated in the Data Depot repository of the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) for open access to inform other research on tornadic loading of buildings. Through dedicated special research symposia on disaster resilience in structural engineering with academics and professionals, the project will enhance partnerships between academia and industry. A mentoring program will support undergraduate students who identify as members of underrepresented groups in structural engineering, and educational outreach activities will improve community tornado hazard awareness.The goal of the study is to improve the understanding of internal pressure of buildings due to sudden occurrences of large openings in the building envelope to enable the accurate assessment of building performance in tornadoes. Our central hypothesis is that transient internal pressure caused by sudden occurrences of large openings in the building envelope is significant and affects the building system differently than when the building is enclosed or has preexisting large openings. A robust computational model validated with testing in a tornado simulator will be developed and output from this model will help enable the design of buildings that are more resilient to tornado events. The research will be carried out by achieving three specific aims. Firstly, transient internal pressure resulting from a sudden failure in the building envelope will be quantified based on experiments in a tornado simulator, and the results will be used to validate computational models. Secondly, the validated computational model will be utilized to study the effects of dominant opening sizes and failure modes on the system strength and resiliency, incorporating inherent system uncertainties. Thirdly, this work will produce fragility functions and recommendations to guide engineers on how to optimize resources to achieve tornado resilient designs.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.