Database-assisted design, standardization, and wind direction effects

The writers present a simple methodology, developed for use in design assisted by electronic aerodynamic and climatological databases (for short, database-assisted design), that allows a realistic assessment of wind directionality effects. The methodology is applied to typical low-rise industrial steel frame buildings with a rectangular shape in plan, located in hurricane-prone areas, and results are compared with results obtained by the procedure specified in the ASCE 7-98 Standard, which, for buildings, consists of applying a blanket directionality reduction factor k(d) = 0.85 to wind effects obtained by disregarding directionality. The results show that, for significant numbers of buildings in hurricane-prone areas, the use of the ASCE procedure can result in the underestimation of wind effects corresponding to strength design. They also show that database-assisted design for wind loads offers the potential for significantly more risk-consistent, safer, and economical design for buildings with both known and unknown orientation.