Performance Evaluation of Tall Buildings Under Winds: From Predictive Methods to Laboratory and Full-Scale Measurements

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Abstract: Despite the prevalence of high-rise developments worldwide, issues associated with the design of these oftentimes slender, flexible structures were perhaps not fully underscored to the wider Structural Engineering community prior to the recent recommendations of the NIST NCSTAR 1, WTC Investigation. In particular, these structures are governed by a unique set of design limit states that encompass not only survivability and serviceability but also habitability, which all must be satisfied in increasingly complex wind environments. In fact, even though the performance of these structures affects the safety and comfort of a large number of people, their design continues to be based on analytical and scaled models that were not systematically validated in full-scale prior to a monitoring program instituted recently in the City of Chicago, which established a multi-faceted, international team to address the problem. This team, in concert with NIST?s Building and Fire Research Laboratory (BFRL), will lead the proposed study, building upon the current efforts in Chicago to expand the collection of structural systems and material types studied, while introducing computational models correlated with rooftop anemometers to capture wind field characteristics over urban environments, to aid in the full-scale validation of predictions made in the design of tall buildings. Not only will the proposed study provide substantive information with respect to this correlation and create an important venue for the development of future prediction techniques, but also more importantly it will provide a unique infrastructure to respond to the NIST NCSTAR 1 Group 1 Recommendations. This response encompasses the following objectives: (1) Develop & Install Advanced Networked Instrumentation; (2) Estimate Building Drift & Acceleration; (3) Develop & Validate a Computational Wind Field Model; (4) Validate Performance Using Full-Scale Data; and (5) Develop Recommendations for Building Drift & Acceleration Limit States.