Effect of Wind Directionality on the Vulnerability of Rural Houses due to Cyclonic Wind

Abstract

A methodology is presented to assess the effect of wind directionality on the vulnerability of rural houses to cyclonic wind speed, and also to provide cyclonic risk assessment of coastal regions. The effect of wind directionality is incorporated in two different ways. In the first case, an equivalent directional effect is used to modify the component failure velocities. In the second case, component failure velocities are converted into direction-dependent failure velocities by finding a wind directional factor for the 16 orthants directly from the data downloaded from the NIST website. For each direction, the vulnerability curve is obtained by a component-based approach in which a damage probability matrix showing the conditional probability of failure of each different component is determined. The final vulnerability curve is drawn for each direction by the convolution technique. The same approach is used for obtaining the vulnerability curve when the average directional effect is considered. The comparison between the vulnerability curves obtained for some of the 16 orthants and that for average direction are compared for an example problem of a coastal region having 100 rural houses.