SimCenter researchers engaged with wind experts and researchers from around the world at the 16th International Conference of Wind Engineering (ICWE16), which was held in Florence, Italy, on August 27-31, 2023. The conference provided a forum for international cooperation in science and technology.

Ahsan Kareem, SimCenter co-PI, then-president of the International Association for Wind Engineering and Chair of the International Advisory Committee for ICWE16, and Robert M. Moran Professor of Engineering in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering & Earth Sciences at the University of Notre Dame, spoke at the opening plenary session on August 28. Professor Kareem’s team of researchers from around the world presented 12 papers at the conference on a range of topics from CFD, aerodynamics, machine learning, hurricane boundary layer modeling, and multi-scale modeling of typhoon/hurricane winds. Some of these papers are related to tools being offered or planned by the SimCenter. One paper was:

• Ding, F., Yi, S., Taflanidis, A., Kareem, A. “Data-base-enabled surrogate-assisted investigation on the interference effect of two adjacent buildings,” where quoFEM was used to train the surrogate model that predicts the spatial pattern of wind pressure.

Tracy Kijewski Correa, SimCenter Working Group Leader for Regional Simulation of Hurricane and Tsunami Hazards, William J. Pulte Director of the Pulte Institute for Global Development and Professor of Civil Engineering and Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, delivered the opening plenary keynote presentation, “Accelerating the disaster data to knowledge life cycle: case studies in the use of open data in recent hurricanes,” which showcased the SimCenter and the use of the R2D software tool to the large plenary audience.

Seymour Spence, SimCenter domain expert and Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of Michigan, presented the following paper.

• Kim, S., Ding, F., and Spence, S.M.J. "Wind-borne debris damage estimation for clusters of buildings based on machine learning and CFD simulations," where WE-UQ was used to execute Computational Fluid Dynamics, with simulations run on DesignSafe's High- Performance Computing resources via the WE-UQ interface. Additionally, BRAILS was employed to model community vulnerability to hurricanes.

Catherine Gorlé, SimCenter domain expert and Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, led a group that presented papers on wind / wave loading, where the work is overall related to SimCenter goals. Papers presented were:

• Ciarlatani, M., Vargiemezis, T., and Gorlé, C. “LES-based multi-fidelity framework for wind loading.”
• Beeman, M., Hwang, H., and Gorlé, C. “Validating multiphase numerical simulation of shoaling waves impacting a cylinder,”
• Hwang, H. and Gorlé, C. “Towards high-fidelity large-eddy simulation of extreme wind/wave events in coastal regions,”
• Hochschild, J. and Gorlé, C. “Comparison of full-scale and LES-predicted peak pressures on the Space Needle,”
• Vargiemezis, T. and Gorlé, C. “LES predictions of wind loads on a low-rise building in an urban area.”