Thomas Baheru

• PhD
• Engineer at Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance, San Ramon, California

Recent large-scale tests provided valuable insight into the wind driven rain deposition distribution and subsequent water surface run-off for low-rise buildings in hurricane conditions. These tests led to better understanding of the phenomena associated with water intrusion through the building envelope, one of the predominant factors contributing...

Full-scale experiments were conducted to investigate wind loading on roof tiles in hip, ridge, and perimeter locations, identified from past storms as main points of damage initiation. The objectives were to: (i) provide test-based data on wind-induced loads for tiles, and (ii) evaluate characteristics of near-surface flows to assess tile loading m...

Wind-driven rain (WDR) intrusion through building envelope defects and breaches is a major source of damage to building interior components and contents during hurricane landfall. The extent of total building interior damage (damage to building interior components, utility, and contents) is a function of the total volume of WDR intrusion which in t...

Wind-driven rain (WDR) effects on various components of a building facade are dependent on the total volume of rainwater deposition. The total volume of WDR deposition at a specific location on the building facade has contributions from both directly impinging raindrops and accumulated surface runoff. The distribution of WDR deposition over the bui...

This paper describes partial turbulence simulation and validation of the aerodynamic pressures on building models for an open-jet small-scale 12-Fan Wall of Wind (WOW) facility against their counterparts in a boundary-layer wind tunnel. The wind characteristics pertained to the Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL) mean wind speed profile and turbulent...

Damage to roof coverings is the leading cause of building performance problems during hurricanes. Post storm reports have indicated that failure of tiled roofs during hurricanes, in most cases, started either from hip, ridge or eave tiles. Such type of failures could be attributed to the inadequacy of design wind loads in standards for tiled roofs...

Wind-driven rain (WDR) is among the important environmental variables that affect the performance and durability of building enclosure systems. Although the need to investigate multi-level effects of WDR on building structures has increased through time, the available methods of investigation have been generally limited to field study and applicati...

Wind-driven rain is one of the main sources of damage to building interior and contents during hurricane landfall. Recently, vulnerability models for hurricane induced total building interior damage (damage to building interior components, utilities, and contents) have been widely developed for prediction of property loss in relation to determinati...

Extensive damage to residential wood-frame buildings caused by failures of roof-to-wall connections during extreme wind events underscores the need to improve their performance. Most of these connections use mechanical connectors, e.g., metal clips and straps (sometimes referred to as hurricane clips and hurricane straps). The allowable capacity of...

The study of wind-driven rain (WDR) has shown a significant progress in past few decades. The applications of semi-numerical and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods have shown major advances to reasonably estimate the amount WDR impinging on building facade. The agreement witnessed between numerical results and actual measurements on existin...

The current hurricane-induced building interior damage prediction model of the Florida Public Hurricane Loss Model uses a physically-based algorithm to predict the damage level and the corresponding cost incurred for a specific hurricane wind speed and associated rain event. Building interior damage ratios are estimated through Monte Carlo simulati...