Structural design of urban habitat construction against catastrophic wind actions

Structural design of urban habitat construction against catastrophic wind actions Conference

Stathopoulos, T, Zisis, I, Baniotopoulos, CC. (2010). Structural design of urban habitat construction against catastrophic wind actions . 519-524.

A significant amount of casualties and losses have been associated with recent and past strong wind events on urban habitat construction. Post-disaster damage assessments reveal the severity and in several cases fatal consequences of such phenomena. The discipline of wind engineering has invested a substantial amount of time and effort towards a better understanding of such extreme events, as well as towards the improvement of the available resources in order to increase confidence on the design process of low-and mid-rise structures against strong winds. The paper will describe a cooperative research project, the main scope of which is to study wind load paths. Specifically, a low-rise wood building was built and equipped with weather, pressure and load monitoring instrumentation and a state-of-the-art data acquisition system. In addition, detailed wind tunnel tests on a scaled model of the building were carried out to study the wind effects. The validation of the simulation tools using the field collected data is one of the main objectives of this study. © 2010 Taylor & Francis Group, London.