Modern pressure measurement technology and structural design for wind: a new collaborative paradigm for wind and structural engineers

Against a brief historical overview, this paper presents the Database-assisted Design (DAD) approach, a conceptually simple, transparent, and rigorous approach to structural design for wind, which fully exploits the potential of modern computational capabilities and pressure measurement technology. A novel collaborative framework between wind and structural engineers assures the effectiveness of this approach and establishes clear lines of responsibility for their respective contributions to the design process. Wind effects with design mean recurrence intervals are determined by DAD more accurately than is possible by using conventional methods for estimating aerodynamic loads, dynamic effects, and wind directionality effects. The DAD approach is consistent with Building Information Modeling (BIM) requirements, and is in principle applicable to most structures for which wind pressures are determined by aerodynamic testing or CFD methods