Engineering Commons^™

The Northern Tornadoes Project - Uncovering Canada’S True Tornado Climatology, David Sills, Gregory A. Kopp, Aaron Jaffe, Elizabeth Sutherland, Connell Miller, Joanne Kunkel, Emilio Hong, Sarah Stevenson, William Wang

Civil and Environmental Engineering Publications

Canada is a vast country with most of its population located along its southern border. Large areas are sparsely populated and/or heavily forested, and severe weather reports are rare when thunderstorms occur there. Thus, it has been difficult to accurately assess the true tornado climatology and risk. It is also important to establish a reliable baseline for tornado-related climate change studies.

The Northern Tornadoes Project (NTP), led by Western University, is an ambitious multidisciplinary initiative aimed at detecting and documenting every tornado that occurs across Canada. A team of meteorologists and wind engineers collects research-quality data during each damage investigation, …

Numerical Study Of Roundness Effect On Flow Around A Circular Cylinder, Ran Wang, Shaohong Cheng, David S.K. Ting

Civil and Environmental Engineering Publications

Imperfectly round bridge stay cable cross section is speculated to be a key factor for wind-induced large-amplitude cable vibrations observed on site. A delayed detached eddy simulation implemented in Open source Field Operation and Manipulation is used to investigate the flow structure around and in the near-wake of an imperfectly round circular cylinder and the corresponding aerodynamic forces at a Reynolds number of 104 and an attack angle of 0° or 45°. With the increase in roundness imperfection, both monotonic and non-monotonic changes of the mean surface pressure and the wake velocity are found when the cylinder is normal to …

Performance-Based Design Of Rc Beams Using An Equivalent Standard Fire, Robert T. Kuehnen, Maged Youssef, Salah El-Din F. El-Fitiany

Civil and Environmental Engineering Publications

The design of buildings for fire events is essential to ensure occupant safety. Supplementary to simple prescriptive methods, performance-based fire design can be applied to achieve a greater level of safety and flexibility in design. To make performance-based fire design more accessible, a time equivalent method can be used to approximate a given natural fire event using a single standard fire with a specific duration. Doing so, allows for natural fire events to be linked to the wealth of existing data from the standard fire scenario.

In this paper, the use of an existing time equivalent method is reviewed and …

Experimental And Numerical Structural Assessment Of Transparent And Tinted Glass During Fire Exposure, A Vedrtnam, C Bedon, Maged A. Youssef, M Wamiq, Amer Sabsabi, S Chaturvedi

Civil and Environmental Engineering Publications

Transparency, illumination, aesthetic and energy requirements have considerably increased the use of glass in modern high-rise buildings. During fire exposure, fracture and shattering of windows and facades accelerate the spread and severity of fire, which increases the risk for the occupants and the amount of structural damage. This paper aims at analyzing the effect of non-uniform thermal gradients on the flexural capacity of ordinary glass panels. Both transparent and tinted glass panels are considered to account for widely-used glass compositions. The bending response of fire-damaged glass panels is experimentally explored considering different durations of thermal exposure. The thermal breakage due …

Seismic Performance Of Modular Steel-Braced Frames Utilizing Superelastic Shape Memory Alloy Bolts In The Vertical Module Connections, Papia Sultana, Maged A. Youssef

Civil and Environmental Engineering Publications

In modular construction, individual modules are constructed at a controlled industrial environment before being transported to site. They are then connected horizontally and vertically to form a structure. The vertical connections can be achieved by welding or bolting the columns of stacked modules. This study investigates the seismic performance of modular steel-braced frames (MSBFs) connected vertically using superelastic shape memory alloy (SMA) bolts. The study also identifies the required locations of SMA connections, in a typical MSBF, to optimize its seismic performance in terms of maximum inter-story drift (MID), maximum residual inter-story residual drift (MRID), and damage scheme.

Performance-Based Design Of Rc Columns Using An Equivalent Standard Fire, Robert T. Kuehnen, Maged A. Youssef, Salah El-Din F. El-Fitiany

Civil and Environmental Engineering Publications

The extreme variability of natural compartment fires poses a significant challenge in the process of performance-based fire design. To reduce this variability, the severity of a natural fire can be related to that of a standard fire, known as a time equivalent (te). In this paper, the applicability of a time equivalent, previously derived based on the average internal temperature profile (AITP) that develops within reinforced concrete (RC) beams exposed to fire from three sides, is examined for RC columns exposed to fire from four sides. A parametric study is presented to examine the suitability of the …