Civil Engineering Commons^™

Development Of A Lightweight Hurricane-Resistant Roof System, Ehssan Amir Sayyafi

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Roofs are the most vulnerable part of the building envelope that often get damaged when subjected to hurricane winds. Damage to the roofs has a devastating impact on the entire structure, including interior losses and service interruptions. This study aimed at the development of a novel light-weight composite flat roof system for industrial, commercial and multi-story residential buildings to withstand Category 5 hurricane wind effects based on the Florida Building Code requirements for hurricane-prone regions, the strictest wind design code in the United States.

The proposed roof system is designed as a combination of two advanced materials: ultra-high performance concrete …

Development Of Effective Approaches To The Large-Scale Aerodynamic Testing Of Low-Rise Building, Tuan-Chun Fu

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Low-rise buildings are often subjected to high wind loads during hurricanes that lead to severe damage and cause water intrusion. It is therefore important to estimate accurate wind pressures for design purposes to reduce losses. Wind loads on low-rise buildings can differ significantly depending upon the laboratory in which they were measured. The differences are due in large part to inadequate simulations of the low-frequency content of atmospheric velocity fluctuations in the laboratory and to the small scale of the models used for the measurements. A new partial turbulence simulation methodology was developed for simulating the effect of low-frequency flow …