Browsing by Author "Flint, Madeleine M."
Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- Analysis of Peak Flow Distribution for Bridge Collapse SitesAshraf, Fahmidah U.; Flint, Madeleine M. (MDPI, 2019-12-21)Bridge collapse risk can be evaluated more rigorously if the hydrologic characteristics of bridge collapse sites are demystified, particularly for peak flows. In this study, forty-two bridge collapse sites were analyzed to find any trend in the peak flows. Flood frequency and other statistical analyses were used to derive peak flow distribution parameters, identify trends linked to flood magnitude and flood behavior (how extreme), quantify the return periods of peak flows, and compare different approaches of flood frequency in deriving the return periods. The results indicate that most of the bridge collapse sites exhibit heavy tail distribution and flood magnitudes that are well consistent when regressed over the drainage area. A comparison of different flood frequency analyses reveals that there is no single approach that is best generally for the dataset studied. These results indicate a commonality in flood behavior (outliers are expected, not random; heavy-tail property) for the collapse dataset studied and provides some basis for extending the findings obtained for the 42 collapsed bridges to other sites to assess the risk of future collapses.
- Application of surrogate models for performance-based evaluation of multi-story concrete buildings at early designZaker Esteghamati, Mohsen; Flint, Madeleine M.; Rodriguez-Marek, Adrian (2022)Data incompleteness and uncertainty impede the application of performance-based design of structures at early design, which relies on data- and time-intensive numerical simulations. Early design is the most influential stage in a buildings' life cycle performance, hence neglecting quantitative methods to evaluate the design in preliminary stages can lead to missing on opportunities to improve building resiliency. This study presents a framework to implement surrogate models for supporting performance-based early design of concrete multi-story buildings. Five different surrogate models including multiple linear regression, random forest, extreme gradient boosting, support vector regression machines, and k-nearest neighbors are developed and compared to represent the seismic-induced structural loss of 720 generic concrete office buildings using early design parameters. Additionally, variance-based sensitivity is used to determine influential parameters for the best-performing model. The results show that extreme gradient boosting and support vector regression machines can be used to relate crude topology and design parameters to building seismic performance with reasonable accuracy.
- Inventory of Seismic Structural Evaluations, Performance Functions and Taxonomies for Buildings (INSSEPT)Zaker Esteghamati, Mohsen; Lee, Jeonghyun; Musetich, Matthew; Flint, Madeleine M.; Sharifi Mood, Mahyar (DesignSafe-CI, 2019-11-25)Relational database of published performance-based earthquake engineering and probabilistic seismic demand analysis results for mid-rise buildings. The database schema is organized based on building taxonomy information and prioritizes structural engineering use cases including comparison of alternative structural systems in early building design and regional seismic portfolio risk analysis. Data provenance, use cases, and sample queries are available in the accompanying manual, as well as two interactive Jupyter notebooks. A full description of the data provenance and schema design is provided in a related manuscript: Zaker Esteghamati, M., Lee J., Musetich M., Flint M. M., `INSSEPT: An open-source relational database of seismic performance estimation to aid with early design of buildings.'
- Life Cycle Assessment Data & Energy Models of Archetype Commercial Buildings Located in the Central and Eastern United StatesZaker Esteghamati, Mohsen; Sharifnia, Houri; Ton, Diep; Asiatco, Patricia; Reichard, Georg; Flint, Madeleine M. (Virginia Tech, 2021-10)This repository contains life cycle assessment data and energy models of six professionally-designed alternatives for a hypothetical 4-story office building in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. The VT-RSB archetypes have identical external and similar internal layouts to support well-controlled comparative assessment of soil-foundation-structure-envelope (SFSE) systems. The six archetype buildings include concrete (frame, wall), steel (frame, braced), masonry, and wood designs. This repository is provided to serve as a possible benchmark environmental data for commercial buildings located in the Central and Eastern United States.
- The role of early design decisions on sustainability of mid-rise office buildings from a comparative LCA perspectiveZaker Esteghamati, Mohsen; Asiatco, Patricia; Diep Ton, Thea; Zhukuva, Natalia; Flint, Madeleine M. (2019)This study compares the environmental impacts of four professionally-designed archetypes building with different combinations of foundation, structure, and envelopes (FSE) assemblies. In addition, detailed operational energy modeling using the EnergyPlus framework is performed. The result shows that early decisions regarding structural and foundation systems significantly affect the production and construction phases, whereas the choice of envelope system is the primary driver of the operational phase. furthermore, the operational phase dominates the life-cycle of the archetypes and therefore, early decisions associated with the operational phase, such as envelope system and expected service life, should be prioritized.