CAREER: Enhancing Hurricane Resistance of Building Exteriors (Envelopes) under Urban Development in a Changing Climate

飓风期间的风灾对建筑物的外观(如玻璃幕墙和窗玻璃)可能是灾难性的。建筑外部的故障可能会导致级联水入侵、内部广泛损坏，并对企业造成破坏。这种损坏造成的维修费用可能会很高。高层和中层建筑的设计寿命为几十年。在建筑物的使用寿命期间，城市化和气候变化对建筑物外部构成了重大的和不断变化的风险，但重大的技术障碍阻碍了在建筑设计和弹性分析中充分考虑这些风险。这一学院早期职业发展(CARAME)奖将支持专注于开发新方法来评估这些不断变化的风险的研究，以改善建筑物外部在飓风中的终身性能，并增强沿海城市社区的弹性。这些方法将被封装在一个用户友好的、基于云的在线应用程序UrbanWinds中，供工程师在新建筑的初步设计或规划阶段快速评估风荷载和建筑风险变化，并评估城市规模建筑库存的变化风险。通过研究和教育的整合，将通过便携式STEM工具包为不同群体的初中生、本科生和研究生设计独特的动手和协作学习体验。这项活动预计将培养下一代工程和教育专业人员，他们接受过风力工程原理、最先进的实验和计算建模技术以及STEM教学技能方面的培训。该奖项将有助于美国国家科学基金会(NSF)在国家减少风暴影响计划(NWIRP)中发挥作用。该项目产生的数据将被存档，并在NSF支持的自然灾害工程研究基础设施(NHERI)数据库(http：//www.DesignSafe-CI.org)中公开可用。该项目的目标是评估在气候变化的城市发展过程中，城市建筑围护结构(“外部”)面临的非平稳(“演变”)飓风风险。将研究一个基于深度学习的数据驱动的城市建筑风压模型，该模型是城市发展过程中周围建筑群变化的函数。将进行风洞试验，为开发数据驱动模型提供风压数据。雷诺数对集群建筑上复杂气动载荷的影响尚未在文献中进行研究，将使用美国国家科学基金会支持的佛罗里达国际大学的大型NHERI风设备墙来研究。由于计算成本巨大，传统的完全耦合概率方法可能不适用于评估建筑物群的风向不确定性。增加气候变化带来的非平稳风险是一个巨大的技术挑战。将开发一种基于可靠性和情景的新方法，以捕捉飓风的非平稳特征和特定地点的风向影响。以上工作结合在一起，将通过捕捉城市发展和气候变化对建筑围护结构造成的风险的基本非平稳特征，推动建筑设计和城市复原力规划领域的发展。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Wind damage during hurricanes can be catastrophic to a building’s exterior (e.g., glass facades and windowpanes). Failure of the building exterior can lead to cascading water intrusion, extensive interior damage, and disruption to businesses. The cost of repair resulting from such damage can be significant. High- and mid-rise buildings are designed to last for decades. During a building’s lifespan, urbanization and climate change pose major and evolving risks to the building exterior, yet significant technical barriers prevent these risks from being adequately considered in building design and resilience analysis. This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award will support research that focused on developing new methodologies to assess these evolving risks to improve the lifetime performance of a building exterior in hurricanes and enhance resilience of coastal urban communities. These methodologies will be encapsulated in a user-friendly, cloud-based online application, UrbanWinds, for engineers to quickly evaluate wind loads and building risk change in preliminary design or planning stages of new buildings, and to assess changing risk of an inventory of buildings at urban scales. Through the integration of research and education, unique hands-on and collaborative learning experiences for diverse groups of middle and high school, undergraduate, and graduate students will be designed through a portable STEM kit. This activity is expected to produce next-generation engineering and education professionals who are trained in principles of wind engineering, state-of-the-art experimental and computational modeling techniques, and STEM teaching skills. This award will contribute to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) role in the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program (NWIRP). Data generated from this project will be archived and made publicly available in the NSF-supported Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Data Depot (https:/www.DesignSafe-CI.org).The goal of this project is to assess the nonstationary (“evolving”) hurricane risks to urban building envelopes (“exterior”) during urban development in a changing climate. A deep learning-based data-driven model of wind pressures on urban buildings as a function of changes in surrounding building clusters under urban development will be investigated. Wind tunnel tests will be conducted to provide wind pressure data for developing the data-driven model. Reynolds number effects on complex aerodynamic loading on clustered buildings, which have not been studied in the literature, will be investigated using the large-scale NSF-supported NHERI Wall of Wind Facility at Florida International University. Traditional fully coupled probabilistic methods may be impractical to assess uncertainties of wind direction for building clusters due to significant computational costs. Adding nonstationary risks due to climate change presents an enormous technical challenge. A new reliability- and scenario-based methodology will be developed to capture the nonstationary characteristics of hurricanes and site-specific wind direction effects. Combined, the above efforts will advance the field of building design and urban resilience planning by capturing essential nonstationary characteristics of risks to building envelopes due to urban development and climate change.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.