Bringing CWE into Industry Practice for Loading
Biography
Melissa, a professional engineer, serves as a Principal, Americas Total Design Leader, and Arup Fellow. In her role as Americas Total Design Leader, Melissa brings together engineers and consultants with deep and diverse expertise, while partnering with clients to deliver innovative, integrated solutions tailored to the unique demands of each project. She actively seeks input from across Arup and her broader professional network, ensuring a holistic approach that responds not only to technical requirements but also to client, community, and operational priorities.
Through her work in the field of wind engineering and complex air flow modelling she has had the opportunity to work and collaborate on some of the world’s most iconic infrastructure. Melissa has extensive experience in investigating wind issues such as wind comfort, wind loading and dynamic response for high-rise buildings, stadiums, pedestrian and long-span bridges and long-span roof structures. She has worked in the world’s leading aeronautical and boundary layer wind tunnels and has a keen understanding of physical and numerical model testing, and replicating flow regimes at scale. Her technical expertise extends to beyond code approaches using advanced analytical tools to quantify and reduce design risk. She has both lived and worked in the UK, Asia, and North America and has a global portfolio of project work.
Abstract
The use of Computational Wind Engineering (CWE) in the built environment has become more common over the past two decades, both in academia and industry. Industry practitioners working in the built environment are more frequently looking to CWE tools to support design. Given the low-cost barrier for entry to CWE and the lack of consistency in modelling approaches, absence of guidance and limited prevalence of peer reviews, there is a growing lack of trust in the industry around the outcomes produced by some forms of CWE. This can be seen through codes and standards around the world not permitting the use of CWE for design (such as the ASCE7-22 and NBCC-20). Thus, currently the results of a CWE study must be verified by running a wind tunnel study to provide validation of the results. Until now.
This talk will detail the soon to be Structural Engineering Institute (SEI) publication of a Prestandard covering Computational Wind Engineering and approaches to using computational simulations to estimate design wind loads for main wind force resisting systems (MWFRS), for individual structural components and cladding (C&C) of buildings, and for appurtenances. This Prestandard standardizes, through performance objectives and acceptance criteria, an approach to CWE simulations that results in wind loading predictions suitable for use in design.
This talk will highlight the positive impact that this Prestandard has on the design community while also identifying some of the unique characteristics of the approach laid out in the Prestandard.
Address
1151 Richmond Street, London, ON, N6A 3K7
cwe2026@uwo.ca
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