Performance-based wind design for tall buildings: Review and comparative study

Abstract

A brief review and state of the art for Performance-Based Wind Design (PBWD) has been presented to provide researchers with clear historic literature on the development of PBWD concepts. The literature clearly emphasizes the main differences between Performance-Based Seismic Design (PBSD) and Performance-Based Wind Design and the challenges incurred. The study presents a brief description of the current prescriptive approaches and the challenges and limitations to their use and the broad wide range of research areas in Performance-Based Design (PBD). It also highlights the nonlinear inelastic response studies for structures subjected to wind loads and the envelope performance for structures. Immense efforts have been made to develop the PBD concepts, and similar to PBSD, the PBWD approach has shown great potential, yet it has several uncertainties that need further investigation. Those PBWD approaches will have a tangible effect on the design concepts and consequently on the design of the fast-growing tall buildings for more resilient communities subjected to extreme wind events and accordingly, more economic designs. Wind tunnels and reliable Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis can help in developing concepts and provide a dynamic load time history which will greatly help in Performance-Based Wind Engineering. The incorporation of field data on non-structural elements' performance during non-synoptic wind incidents (i.e., hurricane and thunderstorm events) into the simulation and analytical models is still under development and shows high potential and promising research outcomes that would help in developing more accurate damage evaluation and serviceability satisfaction. A comparative case study was also presented for the responses under wind and seismic forces. From the study, it can be concluded that PBWD has potential in some cases especially if the governing wind case is the across-wind case, where a significant reduction in base shear and moment values (∼50%) was observed when the building stiffness decreased. On the other hand, when the along-wind load is the governing load case, decreasing the building's stiffness has led to higher base forces (∼100% increase in the responses). However, further investigation is needed to study different aspect ratios and shapes and include more frequency ranges.