Modelling Residential Mitigation Effectiveness for Severe Wind

Modelling the effectiveness of retrofit to legacy houses requires a quantitative estimate of the houses’ vulnerability to severe wind and how the vulnerability is affected by mitigation work. Historical approaches to estimating vulnerability through either heuristic or empirical methods do not quantitatively capture the change in vulnerability afforded by mitigation. To address this information gap the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC project “Improving the Resilience of Existing Housing to Severe Wind Events” has augmented a software tool which models damage from wind loads and associated repair cost. In this paper the development process is described including the establishment of a suite of test cases to assess the effectiveness of the software. An example of the validation work is presented along with the augmentation of the software from the previous version. Finally, use of the software in assessing the incremental effectiveness of a range of mitigation strategies in economic terms is described. Abstract submitted to/presented at the19th Australasian Wind Engineering Society Workshop.