THE BURJ KHALIFA TOWER

Rising 828 meters over the desert metropolis of Dubai, the Burj Khalifa tower is the world's
tallest structure. The 280,000-square-meter skyscraper contains office, residential, and retail
space, along with a Giorgio Armani hotel. The design for the 162-story tower combines local
cultural influences with cutting-edge technology to achieve high performance in an extreme
desert climate.

Figure 1. BURJ KHALIFA Tower

Built of reinforced concrete and clad in glass, the tower is composed of three elements arranged
around a central buttressed core. As it rises from a flat base, setbacks occur at each element in
an upward spiraling pattern, reducing the tower’s mass as it reaches skyward. At the pinnacle,
the central core emerges and is sculpted to form a spire.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) created a simple Y-shaped plan to reduce wind forces,
as well as to foster constructability. Each wing, with its own high-performance concrete core and
perimeter columns, buttresses the others via a six-sided central core, or hexagonal hub. The
result is a tower that is extremely stiff torsionally. SOM applied a rigorous geometry to the tower
that aligned all of the common central core and column elements.
The setbacks are organized in conjunction with the tower’s grid: the stepping is achieved by
aligning columns above with walls below to provide a smooth load path. This enabled
construction to proceed without the normal delays associated with column transfers. At each
setback, the building's width changes. The advantage of the tower's stepping and shaping is, in
essence, to “confuse the wind.” Wind vortexes can never sufficiently coalesce because the wind
encounters a different building shape at each tier.

Figure 2. Design of Burj Khalifa Tower

 THE SHANGHAI TOWER

Located in Shanghai's burgeoning Lujiazui financial district, the Gensler-designed 632-metre-tall

(about 2,073 feet) Shanghai Tower ranks as China’s tallest building and the second tallest
building in the world.

As Shanghai is on a seismic belt and the construction site is in a river basin, a firm foundation
for this skyscraper is very important. To firm up the ground, engineers first put 980 foundation
piles underground to a depth of 86 meters (282 feet), and then poured 61,000 cube meters
(2.15 million cube feet) of concrete to set a 6-meter-thick (20-foot-thick) baseboard for
anchoring the main building.

The exterior of the building spirals upward like a snake. It twists about one degree per floor to
offset the wind effect on higher altitude. This is very important to a super tall building in
Shanghai to withstand frequent typhoons.

But a traditional damper wasn't good enough for the new Shanghai Tower. On the upper floors,
where the flex is greatest, the oscillations would have been fast and wide enough to cause air
sickness (not to mention paralyzing fear). So the building's architects and engineers came up
with a solution. They installed a huge, tuned mass damper, the heaviest-ever flex-reducing
weight in a building, and paired it with a magnetic system to create the first eddy-current damper
used in a skyscraper.

The "tuned" in tuned mass damper refers to an additional element: a control system to limit the
weight's own motion, for maximum damping effect. In many buildings this is accomplished by
passive damping control, but that has a couple of drawbacks: maintenance costs and the
necessity for manual adjustments when vibration frequencies change. So Gensler, the
architects of the Shanghai Tower, created the eddy-current damper, a masterpiece of simplicity.
It consists of a 1,076-square-foot copper plate covered with 125 powerful magnets, mounted
beneath the suspended mass damper. When the building sways, the 1,000-ton iron weight (360
tons heavier than in the previous largest damper) swings over the magnets, inducing an
electrical current in the plate that, in turn, creates an opposing magnetic field, automatically
counteracting the weight's motion and further amplifying its damping effect. No active control or
outside power source is necessary. The magnetic flip occurs because of a version of Newton's
third law called Lenz's law.

The result is not just elegant engineering but measurable benefit. According to Benedict Tranel,
one of the architects of the Shanghai Tower, most people will never feel the building sway, not
even in summer, when the typhoons roar in.
 THE TAIPEI 101 TOWER

Taipei 101 is an iconic skyscraper located in the city of Taipei, in Taiwan. It rises to 509 meters
(1,670 feet) and consists of exactly 101 floors. Designed to withstand typhoons and
earthquakes, the tower has distinctive blue-green glass curtain walls and many of the design
elements incorporate traditional Asian symbolism and feng shui philosophy.

Taipei 101 Tower

Sitting just 660 ft. from a major fault line, Taipei 101 is prone to earthquakes and fierce winds
common in its area of the Asia-Pacific. The engineers had to design a structure that could
withstand gale winds up to 216 km/h and the strongest earthquakes. Typically skyscraper must
be flexible in strong winds yet remain rigid enough to prevent large sideways movement.
Flexibility prevents structural damage while resistance ensures comfort for the occupants and
protection of glass, curtain walls and other features. Most designs achieve the necessary
strength by enlarging critical structural elements such as bracing, but the height of Taipei 101
combined with the demands of its environment called for additional innovations.

To achieve stability and lessen the impact of violent motion, a gigantic tuned mass damper was
designed. The damper consists of a steel sphere 18 feet across and weighing 728 ton,
suspended from the 92nd to the 87th floor. Acting like a giant pendulum, the massive steel ball
sways to counteract the building’s movement caused by strong gusts of wind. Eight steel cables
form a sling to support the ball, while eight viscous dampers act like shock absorbers when the
sphere shifts. The ball can move 5 ft. in any direction and reduce sways by 40 percent. Two
additional tuned mass dampers, each weighing 7 tons, installed at the tip of the spire provide
additional protection against strong wind loads.
 Taipei 101’s tuned mass damper

The engineers were so proud of their creation that they made the damper publicly visible from
an indoor observatory located inside the tower, where recorded voice tours and informative
displays explain to visitors how the thing works. During particularly windy days one can see the
damper in action.

Location of Taipei 101's tuned mass damper.

 Polytechnic University of the Philippines
Master of Science in Structural Engineering
Summer, AY 2016-2017

Assignment No. 3
Research on Top 10 Tallest Building in the World on Damping System

Submitted by:
Modesto O. Macatangay, Jr.

17 May 2017