Experimental study of wind effects on two neighboring super-tall buildings

Abstract

With high-frequency force balance technique, wind tunnel tests have been carried out to study the wind effects on two iconic super-tall buildings located in South China, the Guangzhou East Tower and the Guangzhou West Tower. It was found that the normally used method, which calculates the background response and the resonant response separately and then combines them to get the total response, could give overestimated or underestimated response results. Neglecting the correlation between the background response and the resonant response is the very reason for the inaccuracy. Afterward, the wind-induced responses of Guangzhou East Tower and Guangzhou West Tower are computed by considering four different reference wind speeds obtained from different wind climate models, including the GB, GMB, ZL, and ARA models. It was found that different reference wind speeds from different wind climate models created significantly different structural response results. But, the computational maximum acceleration response by adopting any one of the four wind reference wind speeds is much greater than the field measured maximum instantaneous acceleration at the top of Guangzhou West Tower in the past 7 years, which would suggest that all of the four reference wind speeds from different wind climate models are conservative. If the wind-induced structural response is computed by adopting the field measured wind speed, the computational peak acceleration response is close to the field measured result, indicating the wind tunnel test itself is reliable.