Optimal wind-induced load combinations for structural design of tall buildings

Wind tunnel testing technique has been established as a powerful experimental method for predicting wind-induced loads on high-rise buildings. Accurate assessment of the design wind load combinations for tall buildings on the basis of wind tunnel tests is an extremely important and complicated issue. The traditional design practice for determining wind load combinations relies partly on subjective judgments and lacks a systematic and reliable method of evaluating critical load cases. This paper presents a novel optimization-based framework for determining wind tunnel derived load cases for the structural design of wind sensitive tall buildings. The peak factor is used to predict the expected maximum resultant responses from the correlated three-dimensional wind loads measured at each wind angle. An optimized convex hull is further developed to serve as the design envelope in which the peak values of the resultant responses at any azimuth angle are enclosed to represent the critical wind load cases. Furthermore, the appropriate number of load cases used for design purposes can be predicted based on a set of Pareto solutions. One 30-story building example is used to illustrate the effectiveness and practical application of the proposed optimization-based technique for the evaluation of peak resultant wind-induced load cases.