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

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.