Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Extreme earthquakes and climate conditions cause fatalities, damages to buildings and infrastructure, and economic losses. The structural design requirements for earthquake and climatic loads in codes and standards represent the minimum acceptable measures required to achieve adequate life safety. The loads are calibrated for selected target reliability by considering individual structure or structural members and the statistics of natural hazards. However, all buildings and infrastructure systems in a region are subjected to the same extreme natural event, potentially leading to the collapse of multiple structures. This has serious societal implications since the public reaction to disasters indicates that design by considering the safety of a single structure alone is important but may not be in the best societal interest for a region with spatially distributed buildings and infrastructure systems. Moreover, the current Canadian structural design codes are not cognizant of climate change effects. The proposed research program is to develop risk-based optimal design and retrofit criteria for structures and infrastructure systems to minimize natural disasters and improve societal resilience. The research will advance the knowledge on the effects of extreme weather storms and strong earthquake ground motions on the risk of a group of structures. It integrates advanced climate change modelling results and risk modelling techniques. The program is to: A) Model and map the spatially correlated Canadian climate hazards (i.e., wind, snow, and ice accretion) that include climate change effects and intraevent correlation; B) Model and compare mapped Canadian seismic hazard using different seismic source models, and develop stochastic models and simulation techniques for spatially varying multi-component spatially correlated seismic ground motions; C) Estimate the multi-risk of buildings and infrastructure systems at the regional levels by including climate change effects; and D) Develop and recommend natural loads for design and evaluating structures that are cognizant of climate change effect and regional hazard sensitive. The novelties of the proposal include advancing new climatic hazard models that consider spatial correlation, storm motion, and climate change effects; a better understanding of Canadian seismic hazard; developing new models and simulation techniques for multi-directional spatially correlated stochastic ground motions; quantifying the risk of structures or infrastructure systems subjected extreme natural events; and recommending structural design loads that are information-sensitive, risk-consistent and climate change cognizant. The funding requested for the research program is to support and train 10 PhD and 2 MESc graduate students who will contribute to the society's effort to reduce natural disasters and to build and maintain a resilient society under the threat of natural hazards and by including climate change effects.