Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The applicant proposes to continue his successful research program in the area of wind effects on buildings and their codification, since it has been influential in the development of wind standards and building codes of practice not only in Canada and the U.S. but also in other countries. In the last few years, the applicant has contributed to innovative wind loading code and standard provisions dealing with the design of low buildings with  different roof geometries and configurations; flat roofs of very large sizes; attached canopies, solar panels on roofs, as well as terrain classification for exposure characterization purposes. The applicant's research has been mainly experimental by using the atmospheric boundary layer wind tunnel of Concordia University enhanced by some limited field measurements and large-scale experimental data. In parallel, the applicant has also extended research efforts in computational wind engineering, in which successes were registered in the case of wind environmental issues but work is still in progress regarding structural wind engineering problems. The applicant has served for many years  (and continues to serve) in the ASCE 7 Wind Load on Buildings Committee and the Canadian NBCC Task Group on Climatic Loads and is well aware of the background and the weaknesses of the current wind load provisions in these standards. Moreover, the applicant has been invited to be the Convenor of the International Standards Organization (ISO) TC 098 / SC03 /WG 02 "Wind Action on Structures" being thus in a good position to establish research priorities based on the current needs of the professionals, as far as wind effects and load provisions are concerned. The proposal for this discovery grant intends to both continue and initiate experimental and computational research in the following areas:  -       Wind pressure loads on buildings with emphasis on the effect of different plan view and roof shapes, structural systems, internal pressures and the influence of surroundings and upstream exposure; and carry out pressure measurements on pressure-equalized rain-screen walls, which are presently used for energy conservation purposes as well. -        Performance-based wind engineering processes aiming at the improvement of the present state-of-the-art techniques in the design process. -       Experimental and computational evaluation of wind environmental flows in the building surroundings and the urban environment with emphasis on the complex process of codification of wind-driven rain and other micro-climatic factors. The research results of this proposal will be extremely useful to the engineering profession. This research is also very timely in view of the climatic change, which has already become apparent everywhere, as well as the utilization of artificial intelligence techniques, which may be integrated in the building design and urban microclimate processes.