Estimation of Wind Load Effects with Various Mean Recurrence Intervals with a Closed-Form Formulation

Abstract

This study introduces closed-form formulation for estimating wind load effects with various mean recurrence intervals (MRIs), which was originally derived for assessing probabilistic seismic performance of structures, but has not been adopted in wind engineering community. The accuracy of the closed-form formulation is verified by comparing its estimations with those from traditional numerical integration for a wide range of probabilistic responses of both rigid and flexible structures. The closed-form formulation sheds more physical insights regarding the influence of uncertainties in wind speed and extreme response coefficient. It results in a more convenient and accurate definition of design response for a target MRI over the widely used Cook–Mayne coefficient in wind engineering. With this closed-form framework, the influence of epistemic uncertainties attributed to limited knowledge and data is also quantified in terms of confidence interval of estimation in closed-form formulation.