Wind pressures on tapered and set-back tall buildings

Recent tall buildings tend to have irregular and unconventional shapes as a prevailing but unavoidable trend, which is very effective for suppressing across-wind responses. Suppression of across-wind responses is a major factor in safety and habitability design of tall buildings, and the so-called aerodynamic modification method is comprehensively used. While the effectiveness of aerodynamic modification in reducing wind loads has been widely reported, there have been few detailed investigations of pressure fluctuations. The purpose of the present work is to investigate the spatio-temporal characteristics of pressure fluctuations applied to height-modified tall buildings comprehensively, including differences of vortex formation and shedding mechanism based on the previously reported mechanism of a conventional square tall building. The results show that taper and set-back affect on the bandwidth of power spectra and position of peak frequencies. And through taper and setback, the height at which the vortex begins to form moves up, and due to the small building dimension, the vortex component formed at that height sheds from the building more frequently before an inverted conical vortex is formed over the whole height. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.