High intensity wind load evaluation and mitigation for buildings

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Protecting Canada's built environment against extreme wind and other natural disasters is necessary to save lives and sustain the prosperity of communities. Although significant progress has been made in wind engineering, the characteristics tornadoes and downbursts close to the ground, and their impacts on the built environment, are not clearly understood. The current design and testing methods for buildings, including essential buildings such as hospitals, fire stations and emergency shelters that must remain operational during an emergency, do not take tornadoes and downbursts into consideration. The proposed research will develop novel multi-scale experimental and computer models to reproduce and mitigate tornado and downburst effects on essential buildings. This will be addressed first by generating wind load data using a numerical and the unique state-of-the-art Wind Engineering Environment and Energy (WindEEE) dome, a three-dimensional wind testing chamber which can be configured to produce different flow types including downbursts and tornados. Once the wind load data is generated, mitigation methodologies that aim at reducing wind-induced damage will be developed. Taking advantage of the wind load dependency on a building's overall shape and corner details, mathematical models will be used to identify which kind of local wall and roof corner modifications will work better in reducing those wind loads. Further computer methods that will ultimately enable overall aerodynamic building designs will be developed. The research will make the aerodynamic data obtained from testing various types of small-scale building models and database of near optimally performing building shapes and corner details available for designers. This will allow engineers and architects to design essential buildings that can withstand tornado and downburst forces. It will also lead to the development of new wind mitigation technology and construction methods to reduce catastrophic wind-induced damage in new and existing essential buildings, thus maintaining Canada's leadership in disaster mitigation.