windDESIGN - DAD Software for Rigid, Gable-Roofed Buildings

The software is based on an upgraded version of Database-Assisted Design that streamlines the wind engineering/structural engineering components of the design process by allowing the direct computation of Demand-to-Capacity Indexes (DCIs, i.e., the left-hand side of the design interaction equation). The computation achieves the rigorous combination of imperfectly correlated time series of wind forces and effects thus eliminating errors due to subjective estimates of combined effects. The focus is on simple buildings with gable roofs, portal frames, and bracing parallel to the ridge. Useful features of this work include: the capability to use the two largest building aerodynamics databases available worldwide; the use of large simulated extreme wind databases for hurricane- and non-hurricane-prone regions; a novel interpolation scheme allowing the design of buildings with dimensions not covered in the databases; an effective multiple-points-in-time algorithm for estimating peaks; and parameter-free methods for estimating DCIs with specified mean recurrence intervals.

If you do not have version 7 or version 8 of MATLAB and you are running in the Windows XP/VISTA/7/8 environment, you can download and run the "stand-alone" file below. This contains a "compiled" version of the software.

Specifically, the following options are available:

• The file may be provided as a self-extracting zip file. The advantages of this format are that the files are compressed (which speeds downloading) and that no software is required to unpack the files. The disadvantages of this format are that they only work for Windows platforms and some firewalls disallow the downloading of files with a "EXE" file extension.

• The files are provided as non-self-extracting zip files. The advantage of this format is that it can be unpacked on Unix/Linux platforms (use the "unzip" command) and it can possibly be downloaded on Windows sites that disallow "EXE" files. The disadvantage is that Windows users will need software (typically the WinZip software, but it is possible that other archiving software can also handle this format) to unpack the files.

• If for some reason you are unable to either download or unpack the zip files, we provide links to the individual files. The advantages of this approach are that it should work in cases where the other formats are not feasible and that it allows you to selectively download files (e.g., you may want to only download a small subset of the sample data or pressure files). The disadvantage is that it can be tedious and slow to download all the files individually.

• NIST Technical Note 1908 (http://dx.doi.org/10.6028/NIST.TN.1908, PDF format), (Word format)

• Stand-alone executable for Windows Platforms (self-extracting zip file, non-self-extracting zip file).

  This stand-alone executable requires installation of MCRInstaller.exe from The Mathworks, Inc. The authors' limited rights to the deployment of this program are limited by a license agreement between NIST and The MathWorks. The license agreement can be found at www.mathworks.com/license/.

  The "stand-alone.exe" file is approximately 4.35MB while "MCRInstaller.exe" is approximately 87MB.

• Sample Building Input (self-extracting zip file, non-self-extracting zip file, or individual ASCII files).

• Sample Aerodynamic Databases (self-extracting zip file, non-self-extracting zip file, or individual ASCII files).

• Simulated Directional Hurricane Wind Speed Data (self-extracting zip file, non-self-extracting zip file, or individual ASCII files).

• Sample non-Hurricane Wind Speed Data (self-extracting zip file, non-self-extracting zip file, or individual ASCII files).

• Filmon Habte (fhabt003@fiu.edu)
• DongHun Yeo (donghun.yeo@nist.gov)