Cumulative fatigue damages of nonstructural members under repeated cyclic wind actions

Abstract

This paper describes the fundamental behaviour about cumulative damages of nonstructural members such as glass window sashes under destructive cyclic wind disturbances.The analysis consists of wind modelling for fatigue damages and the formulation to obtain the cumulative damage analysis.First, in modelling the observed strong wind information, three steps of wind action in the long period are selected to discuss the fatigue damage properties.The fist wind model is to present the simple strong wind continuing normally during 20 to 30 hours from annual average about 4 5 m/s to the extreme maximum wind velocity.Next step is to represent the whole annual wind actions using the meteorologically obseved wind velocity per hour.Finally, the return period concept is utilized to the overall fatigue damage of a life time of the structure or members.Accordingly, the damage responses of nonstructural members are presented in three parts.The basic concept to give a quantitative expression of a cumulative fatigue damage is proposed when the simple strong wind is subjected to nonstructural member. The annual cumulative damages and fatigue behaviour in the return period are also discussed on the basis of computed results.One of the most important results is to evaluate the cyclic repeated wind action to structural safety rather than the most large extreme value in the previously observed data.