The purpose of this grant with the city college of new york is to develop reliability analysis methodologies that would consider the nonstationary nature of climatic loads but that remain consistent…

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) awarded a $291,476 Cooperative Agreement to the Research Foundation of the City University of New York (RFCUNY) under the Measurement and Engineering Research and Standards (CFDA 11.609) federal grant program. The purpose of this grant is to develop reliability analysis methodologies that account for the nonstationary nature of future climatic loads, while remaining consistent with current uniform reliability principles used in modern structural design codes. The project will demonstrate the applicability of the methodology to develop design loads for structures subjected to rain, snow, ice, wind, and floods, as well as assess the safety of structures under combinations of evolving climatic and non-climatic loads. The expected outcomes include establishing advanced structural design criteria for future building codes to improve the capacity of structures to withstand extreme climate events, and calibrating load combination factors for inclusion in future editions of the ASCE Minimum Design Loads and Associated Criteria for Buildings and Other Structures standard to account for climate change effects.

Activities

The study will first review the basic principles of uniform reliability upon which current structural design standards and codes are based and describe how to extend these principles to account for the time-variant nature (i.e., nonstationarity) of future climatic hazards. The applicability of the procedure to develop design loads for structures subjected to rain, snow, ICE, wind and floods will be demonstrated. The method will be extended to also describe how to assess the safety of structures subjected to a combination of evolving climatic loads as well as combinations of climatic and non-climatic loads.simple numerical examples will be presented to demonstrate how the proposed procedures can be implemented for the safety assessment of existing facilities or the design of new structures. Furthermore, the study will demonstrate how the method can be used to calibrate structural design hazard maps for climate-related extreme events to meet the minimum standards of safety implied in current specifications.

Expected outcomes

The methodology will help establish advanced structural design criteria that would be implementable by public agencies in next generation building codes that will improve their capacity to withstand future extreme climate events. The project will also introduce an approach to calibrate load combination factors suitable for inclusion in future editions of the american society of civil engineers? (asce) minimum design loads and associated criteria for buildings and other structures standards (asce-7) to account for the effect of climate change when designing new structures and assessing the safety of existing facilities.

Intended beneficiaries

Information gathered from this research will help improve codes and standards for structures subject to natural hazards, particularly those affected by future climate effects. Additionally, this research will support advances in community resilience planning for future hazards. These advances in characterizing future hazards for design of structures will save lives and limit costs by ensuring sustained structural integrity.

Subrecipient activities

The recipient does not intend to subaward funds.