NONUNIFORM TALL BUILDING STRUCTURES - GLOBAL DISCRETE SOLUTION BASED ON THE CONTINUOUS MEDIUM TECHNIQUE

Structural analysis due to wind effects on tall buildings may be performed by the continuous equivalent medium technique which considers the actual floors replaced by continuously distributed horizontal diaphragms through the building height. The continuous medium technique has a very simple one-dimensional formulation, requiring a small number of parameters and allowing global answer about the whole building performance. Adding to that simplicity of the formulation the potentiality of the finite element method, used to discretize the building and its equivalent continuous medium, a powerful tool arises and important as well as simple numerical solutions can be achieved, mainly for problems where geometric or loading changes occur through the height of the building. For these cases analytical solutions rarely exist or are very difficult to obtain.