Tall Buildings with Dynamic Facade Under Winds

Abstract

Burgeoning growth of tall buildings in urban areas around the world is placing new demands on their performance under winds. This involves selection of the building form that minimizes wind loads and structural topologies that efficiently transfer loads. Current practice is to search for optimal shapes, but this limits buildings with static or fixed form. Aerodynamic shape tailoring that consists of modifying the external form of the building has shown great promise in reducing wind loads and associated structural motions as reflected in the design of Taipei 101 and Burj Khalifa. In these buildings, corner modifications of the cross-section and tapering along the height are introduced. An appealing alternative is to design a building that can adapt its form to the changing complex wind environment in urban areas with clusters of tall buildings, i.e., by implementing a dynamic facade. To leap beyond the static shape optimization, autonomous dynamic morphing of the building shape is advanced in this study, which is implemented through a cyber–physical system that fuses together sensing, computing, actuating, and engineering informatics. This approach will permit a building to intelligently morph its profile to minimize the source of dynamic wind load excitation, and holds the promise of revolutionizing tall buildings from conventional static to dynamic facades by taking advantage of the burgeoning advances in computational design.