Performance Assessment and Development of Prescriptive Design Standards for Wood-Frame Residential Structures Under Extreme Wind Loads
Bibliographic record
Abstract
High-wind events cause significant damage to structures and property; in particular, light-frame wood homes are abundant and especially vulnerable. Canadian homes are built to prescriptive standards that are based on historical construction methods and have remained relatively unchanged structurally across several decades. While recent work is contributing to improving building codes and providing voluntary standards for improving wind resilience of houses in Canada, there exists a gap in understanding of structural behaviour of light-frame buildings. Such an understanding would help to bridge the difference between conservative, fully-engineered solutions and slowly-evolving prescriptive solutions which are based on observed performance of houses from years past. With increasing extreme weather events, and drastic changes in the typical house design since the inception of the building code, there is a need for methodology to better understand and make use of the realistic structural behaviour of houses exposed to high winds. This thesis presents a comprehensive assessment of light-frame Canadian homes constructed to current prescriptive standards and their potential to withstand high winds. The focus of this research is to improve the understanding of the vertical load path through houses built to the current NBC Part 9 provisions. First, engineering calculations are applied to estimate the uplift resistance of certain links in the vertical load path in order to identify provisions in Part 9 that would not meet the structural design requirements of Part 4, or even less-conservative versions where load and resistance factors are removed. The weak links are then proven using field observations and forensic assessment of wind-damaged buildings. To quantify the behaviour of light-frame roofs under realistic wind uplift, full-scale experimental results and finite element modelling are combined. A full-scale experimental data set is utilized for examination of load transfer, and a non-linear finite element modelling approach is developed to estimate wind speeds causing failure of the archetype roof. This work proves the concept of load redistribution through light-frame, trussed roofs under wind uplift and identifies a distinct tendency for the gable end truss to carry a large proportion of roof uplift. A number of design alternatives are developed, modelled, and compared in order to identify solutions that would make efficient use of the load sharing behaviour of gable roofs and improve their resistance to high wind loads.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".