Wind loading

In
Tall buildings
 Cont…….

 The lateral loading due to wind or earth quake is the

major factor that causes a design of high rise building to
differ from those of low - to medium – rise buildings

 For the buildings up to ten storeys the design is rarely

effected by wind loads whereas above this height
buildings the wind load effect is more
 Cont…..
 But now with few innovations such as architectural
treatment, increases in strength of material and
advances in method of analysis tall building structures
have become efficient and lighter

 Therefore they are consequently more prone to deflect

and event to sway under wind loading
 Cont……
 This served as a spur to research and paved a way in
developing methods for its estimation
 This developments have been mainly in experimental
and theoretical techniques for determining the increase
in wind loading due to gusting and dynamic interaction
of structures with gust forces
 With consideration of gust loading two methods where
described for tall building to with stand wind loading
 Static approach
 The first method is static approach in which the building is
assumed to be fixed rigid body in wind
 Static methods are appropriate for tall buildings of
unexpectational height, slenderness, or susceptibility to
vibration in the wind
 This method is defined in uniform building code as those of
height greater than 400 feet (123m),or of height greater
than five times their width , or those with structures that
are sensitive to wind – excited oscillations
 Ubc method 1988
(static approach)
 This method is a representative of modern static methods of
estimating wind loading for gust effects and for local extreme
pressures
 It also accounts for local differences in exposure between the open

counter side and a city center whose safety must be ensured for use
after an extreme wind strong
 The design wind pressure is obtained from the formula P
= CC Cq q I
where CC is a coefficient to account for combined effects of height ,
exposures and gusting
Cq is a coefficient that allows for locally high pressure for walls and roofs
 q is the pressure(wind stagnation pressure for minimum
basic 50year wind speed at a height of 30 feet above
ground
 I - importantance factor
Height above Exposure C Exposure B
average level of
adjoining
ground(feet)
0-20 1.2 0.7
20-40 1.3 0.8
40-60 1.5 1.0
60-100 1.6 1.1
100-150 1.8 1.3
150-200 1.9 1.4
200-300 2.1 1.6
300-400 2.2 1.8
 Dynamic methods
 The other method described is dynamic methods which are
for exceptionally tall , slender or vibration- prone buildings
 Under extremely severe exposure condition the effective
wind loading on the building may be increased by dynamic
interaction between the motion of the building and gusting
of the method
 The dynamic method is proceeded by following two
methods
1. wind tunnel experiment method
2. detailed analytical method
 Wind tunnel experimental
method(dynamic method)
 Wind tunnel test is to determine the static pressure
distribution or force on a building
 This approach is satisfactory for the building whose motion is
negligible and therefore has little effect on wind loading
 In this case the elastic structural properties and mass
distribution of the building as well as the relevant
characterstics of the wind should be modeled
 The wind characterstics that have to be generated in the
wind tunnel are the vertical profile of the horizontal velocity,
the turbulence intensity and the power spectral density of
the longitudinal component
 Conti……
 Special boundary layer wind tunnels have been designed
to generate this characteristics
 Building models for wind tunnel test are constructed to
scales which varying from 1/100 to 1/1000,depending on
the size of the building and size of the wind tunnel, with
the scale of 1/400 being common
 Detailed analytical
method(dynamic method)
 Wind tunnel testing is a highly specialized , complex and
expensive procedure and can be justified only for high
cost projects
 To bridge the gap between those buildings that required
only a simple approach to wind loading a more detailed
analytical methods have been developed that allow the
dynamic wind loading to be calculated (included in
NATIONAL BUILDING CODE OF CANADA NBCC)
 The external pressure or suction p on the surface of the
building is obtained using the basic equation
p = q cc cB cp