• Wind and Structures
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• v.38 no.5
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• pp.355-366
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• 2024

Severe natural multi-hazard events can cause damage to infrastructure and economic losses of billions of dollars. The challenges of modeling these losses include dependency between hazards, cause and sequence of loss, and lack of available data. This paper presents and explores multi-hazard loss modeling in the context of the combined wind and rain vulnerability of mid/high-rise buildings during hurricane events. A component-based probabilistic vulnerability model provides the framework to test and contrast two different approaches to treat the multi-hazards: In one, the wind and rain hazard models are both decoupled from the vulnerability model. In the other, only the wind hazard is decoupled, while the rain hazard model is embedded into the vulnerability model. The paper presents the mathematical and conceptual development of each approach, example outputs from each for the same scenario, and a discussion of weaknesses and strengths of each approach.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.2
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• pp.607-617
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• 2019

Global warming and climate change are increasing the intensity of typhoons and hurricanes and thus increasing the risk effects of typhoon and hurricane hazards on nuclear power plants (NPPs). To reflect these changes, a new NPP should be designed to endure design-basis hurricane wind speeds corresponding to an exceedance frequency of $10^{-7}/yr$. However, the short typhoon and hurricane observation records and uncertainties included in the inputs for an estimation cause significant uncertainty in the estimated wind speeds for return periods of longer than 100,000 years. A logic-tree framework is introduced to handle the epistemic uncertainty when estimating wind speeds. Three key parameters of a typhoon wind field model, i.e., the central pressure difference, pressure profile parameter, and radius to maximum wind, are used for constructing logic tree branches. The wind speeds of the simulated typhoons and the probable maximum wind speeds are estimated using Monte Carlo simulations, and wind hazard curves are derived as a function of the annual exceedance probability or return period. A logic tree decreases the epistemic uncertainty included in the wind intensity models and provides reasonably acceptable wind speeds.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.449-464
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• 2016

Catastrophe models appraise the natural risk of the built-infrastructure simulating the interaction of its exposure and vulnerability with a hazard. Because of unique configurations and reduced number, mid/high-rise buildings present singular challenges to the assessment of their damage vulnerability. This paper presents a novel approach to estimate the vulnerability of mid/high-rise buildings (MHB) which is used in the Florida Public Hurricane Loss Model, a catastrophe model developed for the state of Florida. The MHB vulnerability approach considers the wind pressure hazard exerted over the building's height as well as accompanying rain. The approach assesses separately the damages caused by wind, debris impact, and water intrusion on building models discretized into typical apartment units. Hurricane-induced water intrusion is predicted combining the estimates of impinging rain with breach and pre-existing building defect size estimates. Damage is aggregated apartment-by-apartment and story-by-story, and accounts for vertical water propagation. The approach enables the vulnerability modeling of regular and complex building geometries in the Florida exposure and elsewhere.

• Spatial Information Research
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.1-10
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• 2011

This research examined relationships between Scientifically Estimated Environmental Risks (SEERs) of floods, hurricanes and hazardous material releases, and household characteristics. This research showed that there were no statistically significant relationships between most of the demographic characteristics (age, household size, tenure at the present home) and SEERs of the two natural hazards (a flood and a hurricane). These results support Drabek's findings (1986) that people tend to underestimate or ignore natural hazards in selecting their residence regardless of age, household size, and house tenure. Educational attainment and yearly household income were positively correlated with hurricane risk, but not with flood risk. By contrast, SEER of hazardous materials was correlated with all demographic characteristics mentioned above. This result may show that those who are relatively poorer and have lower educational level tend to be limited to living in communities more vulnerable to human-made risk.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.415-421
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• 2013

In order to extend the service life of a nuclear power plant(NPP) ensuring the structural safety, effective and efficient management of NPP considering structural deteriorations and various natural hazard risks has been treated as a significant tool(IAEA 1998). The systemic efforts is required to prevent the potential loss of NPPs resulting from the natural hazard including earthquakes, hurricane and flooding since the Fukushima accident. Earthquake risk of building structures can be mitigated through appropriate seismic isolation system installation. It has been known that a seismic isolation system can lead to reduction of the deleterious effect on ground motion induced by earthquakes, and structural safety can be improved. In this paper, the NPP life-cycle management is reviewed. Furthermore, effect of seismic isolation on the NPP life-cycle cost analysis with earthquake, and cost-benefit analysis in terms of life-cycle cost when applying the seismic isolation systems to NPP are introduced.

• Bulletin of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.29-35
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• 1987

As offshore activities move into deeper ocean, conventional fixed-base platforms drastically increase in size and cost, One of alternatives available is a guyed tower, in which environmental loads are supported by guylines instead of structural members. The guying system of the guyed tower is designed on one hand to be stiff enough to limit the structural displacement in normal operations, but on the other hand to be soft enough to permit large slow sways during the presence of design-level storms. This compliancy provides an efficient means of withstanding harsh environment so that the disproportionate increase in size of deep water platforms can be kept to a rational limit. Novel configurations contain always some degrees of potential risks mainly due to the lack of experience. The most critical hazard inherent to a guyed tower may be the pullout of anchor piles. Once it happens, the guyline fails to function and it may eventually lead to the total collapse of the system. It is the aim of this paper to discuss and quantify the anchor-pullout risk of a guyed tower. A stochastic analysis is made for evaluating the first-upcrossing probability of the tension acting on anchor piles over the uplift capacity. Nonlinearities involved in the mooring stiffness and hydrodynamics are taken into account by using time-domain analysis. A simplified two dimensional dynamic model is developed to exemplify the underlying concept. Real hurricane data in the Gulf of Mexico spanning over 70 years are incorporated in a numerical example of which result clearly indicates highly potential risk of anchor pullout.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.1-14
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• 2024

Widespread damages from extreme winds have attracted lots of attentions of the resilience assessment of power distribution systems. With many related environmental parameters as well as numerous power infrastructure components, such as poles and wires, the increased challenge of power asset management before, during and after extreme events have to be addressed to prevent possible cascading failures in the power distribution system. Many extreme winds from weather events, such as hurricanes, generate widespread damages in multiple areas such as the economy, social security, and infrastructure management. The livelihoods of residents in the impaired areas are devastated largely due to the paucity of vital utilities, such as electricity. To address the challenge of power grid asset management, power system clustering is needed to partition a complex power system into several stable clusters to prevent the cascading failure from happening. Traditionally, system clustering uses the Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) to derive the clustering result, which is time-consuming and inefficient. Meanwhile, the previous studies considering the weather hazards did not include any detailed weather-related meteorologic parameters which is not appropriate as the heterogeneity of the parameters could largely affect the system performance. Therefore, a fragility-based network hierarchical spectral clustering method is proposed. In the present paper, the fragility curve and surfaces for a power distribution subsystem are obtained first. The fragility of the subsystem under typical failure mechanisms is calculated as a function of wind speed and pole characteristic dimension (diameter or span length). Secondly, the proposed fragility-based hierarchical spectral clustering method (F-HSC) integrates the physics-based fragility analysis into Hierarchical Spectral Clustering (HSC) technique from graph theory to achieve the clustering result for the power distribution system under extreme weather events. From the results of vulnerability analysis, it could be seen that the system performance after clustering is better than before clustering. With the F-HSC method, the impact of the extreme weather events could be considered with topology to cluster different power distribution systems to prevent the system from experiencing power blackouts.