Probabilistic assessment of wind loads on a full scale low rise building

Date

2006-05

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Abstract

The damage to low-rise buildings caused by wind was significant in recent years. How to specify appropriate wind loads on low-rise buildings to balance the requirements of economic and safety design is crucial.

The full-scale experiments conducted at TTU have set a widely accepted benchmark on wind loads on low-rise buildings. The large amount of data recently collected from the full-scale measurements carried out at WERFL, TTU enable a systematic investigation of the area-averaged wind pressures and wind forces on low-rise buildings.

In this study, the correlations between the wind and its actions were investigated. The assessment methods of wind loads on static structures were calibrated. The techniques employed to predict the peak pressure (force) coefficients were examined. It was found that the Type I extreme distributions fitted to the pseudo-steady pressure (force) coefficients very well.

The findings of this study were incorporated into the probabilistic framework in the context of LRFD design to examine their effects on the wind load factors for ultimate limit state design. The primary results indicate that the inconsistent specification of the extreme wind loads can be partly due to ignoring the distributions of the extreme pressure (force) coefficients and their correlations with the wind speeds.

Description

Keywords

Correlation, Area averaged, Low-rise buildings, Wind loads

Citation