Date of Award

2016

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Civil Engineering (PhD)

Administrative Home Department

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Advisor 1

Yue Li

Committee Member 1

William M. Bulleit

Committee Member 2

Raymond A. Swartz

Committee Member 3

Qiuying Sha

Abstract

Wood residential construction is vulnerable to hurricanes, as evident in recent hurricane events. Many studies indicated that the changing climate may very likely alter hurricane patterns, which could lead to more severe hurricane damage to the wood residential construction that accounts for 90% of the residence in the USA. On the other hand, deterioration of material increases the chance of structural failure by reducing the structural capacity (e.g., corrosion of fasteners in roof panel could significantly reduce the withdrawal capacity of the roofing structure during hurricane events).

Currently, most hurricane damage estimations only focus on direct loss (e.g., structural loss). Under this context, hurricane damage to wood residential construction could be underestimated. Other than just evaluating direct monetary loss, this research evaluates indirect, social disruption, and environmental losses of wood residential construction subjected to hurricane events considering a changing climate.

This dissertation proposes a framework to evaluate hurricane resilience of residential community, which has been recognized a more comprehensive risk-based measure for risk assessment. The advantages of applying hurricane resilience framework include: 1) the incorporation of community recovery time modelling from hurricane events, 2) the ability to integrate all the key input from traditional risk assessment framework into a simple probabilistic expression, 3) a more accurate criterion to be used in the planning stage for designer and decision maker. The proposed framework consists of hurricane fragility analysis, reliability analysis, loss evaluation (i.e., direct, indirect, social disruption, and environmental losses), recovery time model, and potential impacts on hurricane hazard patterns from a changing climate. Sources of uncertainties in the framework include: 1) structural capacity uncertainty (e.g., changes in roof-panel-resistance-side due to effects of corrosion on metal fasteners), 2) load uncertainty (e.g., hurricane wind characteristics, hurricane simulations), 3) uncertainty in loss estimation, 4) recovery time modeling uncertainty, and 5) uncertainty from climate change.

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