Performance-Based Engineering of Wind-Excited Structures: A General Methodology

The current prescriptive design philosophy that relies simply on meeting requirements stipulated in standards is shifting towards a performance-based design (PBD) approach for achieving designs that rationally meet society’s need for a truly safe built environment. Extensive research has facilitated the successful adoption of PBD in earthquake engineering, but the same cannot be said for wind engineering. Therefore, the need exists to initiate a similar effort by defining a framework that fully embraces the concepts of PBD during the design of building systems to resist severe wind events. This paper illustrates the development of such a PBD framework. In particular, a method is proposed specifically for multi-story wind excited buildings in order to mitigate structural and non-structural damage and loss. In particular, the post-yield behavior of the structural system is modeled using the theory of dynamic shakedown, therefore providing a full portrait of the post-yield behavior without the need for computationally expensive non-linear finite element models. A case study is presented illustrating the practicality of the proposed PBD framework.