Optimal Wind Resistant Performance-Based Design of Tall Buildings

The world is experiencing an upsurge of tall building construction. Recent trends toward developing increasingly taller and irregularly-shaped complex buildings imply that these structures are potentially more sensitive to wind excitation. Structural engineers are facing the challenge of striving for the most efficient and economical design solution while ensuring that the final design of a building must be serviceable for its intended function, habitable for its occupants and safe over its design life-time. Performance-based design (PBD) is a modern approach to the design of building structures. While PBD is still under active development primarily in seismic engineering, the concept of performance-based wind engineering should be extended to the design of wind sensitive tall buildings. This paper presents a computer based technique for optimal wind resistant performance-based design of tall buildings under various levels of wind hazards. Once the wind-induced loads and responses of a tall building structure under multiple levels of wind events are accurately determined, the optimal performance-based design problem can then be explicitly formulated. A rigorously derived Optimality Criteria (OC) method is to be developed to solve the optimal structural solution satisfying the strength (life-safety), drift (damage) and acceleration (occupant comfort) design performance constraints. The effectiveness and practicality of the optimal design technique are illustrated through an actual 40-story building with complex 3D mode shapes.