Wind Load Factors for Use in the Wind Tunnel Procedure

A 2004 Skidmore Owings and Merrill report (in Simiu E. (2011) Design of Buildings for Wind, Appendix 5, Wiley, Hoboken, NJ) notes that the ASCE 7 Standard (American Society of Civil Engineers (2002) ASCE 7–02, Reston, Va) is incomplete insofar as it provides no guidance on wind load factors appropriate for use with the Standard’s wind tunnel procedure. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to such guidance. Based on a classical definition of wind load factors as functions of uncertainties in the micrometeorological, wind climatological, aerodynamics and structural dynamics elements that determine wind loads, the paper presents a simple, straightforward approach that allows practitioners to use appropriate wind load factors applicable when those uncertainties are either the same as or different from those assumed in the development of the ASCE 7 Standard. Illustrations of the approach are presented for a variety of cases of practical interest. In estimating design wind loads, the various uncertainties should not be accounted for in isolation, for example by specifying peak pressure coefficients with percentage points higher than those corresponding to their expected values. Rather, to achieve risk-consistent designs, the uncertainties should be accounted for collectively, in terms of their joint effect on the design wind loading. The design wind effect is equal to the estimated expectation of the peak wind effect times a load factor that, in most cases, is not significantly different from the load factor explicitly or implicitly specified in the ASCE 7 Standard. Notably, the load factor is not affected significantly by errors associated with interpolations required in typical Database Assisted Design applications. However, if the available wind speed records are several times shorter than, say, 20 to 30 years, the wind load factors increase by amounts of the order of 15 %.