Grand Challenges in Wind Engineering: Advancing Cyber-Physical Tools to Investigate Structural Performance of Buildings

Identifying the next challenges for wind engineering is a highly active topic. In the last year, the American Society of Civil Engineers convened a national meeting on the Future of Wind Engineering to discuss emerging and trending topics. The National Science Foundation has reimagined the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation as the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure program to promote collaboration over the next decade between the earthquake engineering community and its counterparts in severe weather (tropical cyclones, thunderstorms, and tornadoes). The National Institute of Standards and Technology is also launching strategic planning for the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program. The reason for this increased interest in wind engineering stems from, in part, the globally escalating loss of property during extreme wind events. Windstorms caused $18.4B in insured losses in 2014 alone (Swiss Re, 2015). The population at the coast continues to rise, which in the long-term will force greater attention on sheltering in place to combat congested evacuation. Tornado outbreaks occurring during the last 5 years are also shifting the mindset of engineers and decision makers about performance expectations for buildings in mid latitude regions that are prone to thunderstorms and tornadoes. Multi-objective design philosophies [e.g., van de Lindt et al. (2013)] adapted from the seismic engineering community may eventually complement the current approach, which largely rests on linear-elastic analysis and ignores the collapse limit state. The Grand Challenge is to broadly advance computational wind engineering and to develop cyber-physical methods to investigate the performance of civil infrastructure systems in the context of structural wind loading. The short-term goal is to reduce the reliance of the wind engineering field on physical testing, both and modeland full-scale, and in the long-term, to open new pathways to solving large-scale problems efficiently and accurately through computational methods. The timing to make contributions to the field of wind engineering has never been better, irrespective of the domain expertise brought to bear to find solutions. The wind engineering community is primarily a mix of civil and mechanical engineers, engineering mechanics, and atmospheric scientists. There is ample room for new minds and perspectives originating from outside the discipline. Building physics/science, material science, optimization, and cognitive computing are but a few of the areas outside wind engineering that can contribute.