LAUSR

Abstract The performance assessment of wind-excited multi-story building systems is undergoing a period of rapid change with a number of performance assessment frameworks being proposed that are based on the principles of performance-based design. Having said this, there is still a significant lack of computational frameworks that can holistically treat the building envelope of this class of building systems. Indeed, the majority of research in this direction has focused on estimating damages and losses due to excessive structural response, notwithstanding the important role played by other damage mechanisms, such as those driven by excessive dynamic pressures. This paper introduces a computational framework that can holistically treat multiple damage mechanisms during the performance assessment of building envelopes of wind-excited engineered systems. In particular, interdependent envelope damage states driven by dynamic internal/external wind pressures and structural responses are modeled through multiple dependent fragility functions. Consequences are modeled in terms of the envelope components’ final damage states as well as the ingress of wind driven rain. By setting the framework in a simulation environment, probabilistic estimates of the performance metrics are provided as output. A full scale application is presented illustrating the proposed framework.