Assessment of Cumulative Wind Forces on High Rise Buildings

2/13/17
City College of New York, 160 Convent Ave
Oleg Gousha, Orlando Cole Gorton

I. Proposal Summary/Abstract
This project provides an outline for regulations based on advanced level wind design,
and ties into the codes and laws that are followed or should be followed based on the
surroundings and environment of high-rise buildings. While the current project we are
working on focuses on key design issues including resonance, acceleration, and damping,
the future project will focus on how surrounding areas can impact that data. By creating one
or multiple, rotating, urban environments and measuring turbulence, using a hotwire probe
and piezoelectric cantilever beam or another method, in order to observe which
environments are more suitable for tall buildings. Forces like turbulence and resonance are
greatly affected by the position of multiple buildings. Whether the distance between two
buildings is adequate is decided by how much stress is deemed safe. This means that the
current code might be failing to address the forces that while negligible on short and medium
rise buildings, are very important with high rises. By comparing the results of the experiment
to current regulations, we can check if they are adequate. The data measured in this
experiment has the potential to lead to the creation of new regulations that monitor not only
the individual buildings structural integrity, but its effect on the buildings surrounding it.

II. Background/Introduction
This experiment focuses on the ways in which the surroundings may affect high-rise
buildings, and how those effects should be considered and included in regulations. The
current United States Code mostly focuses on internal disasters like fires, and zoning laws
dont focus as much on the physical danger of the surrounding area as they do on the
economic effects they may have. As an example The Australian Code favors a simplistic
outline that is only useful in the design and building of a small or medium rise structure.1 The
Australian system drastically underestimates the effect wind has on tall structures, but more
importantly the procedure for finding lateral loads ignores key design issues including
resonance, acceleration, damping, and structural stiffness.2 It also fails to demonstrate how
one building interacts with the other buildings around it based on wind directionality and
turbulence.3 This means that the current code fails to address the systems that, while
negligible on short and medium rise buildings, are very important with high rises. The
modernized system will take these factors into account to prevent wind based damage to tall
and potentially dangerous structures. The new project would focus on the overlooked effects
and their relationship to area surrounding the building.

In america (as of 2004) the safety code regarding extreme events is incredibly loose
for the amount of potential danger in high-rises during natural disasters.4 A paper I read by
Bruce Ellingwood, David Rosowsky, Yue Li, Jun Hee Kim that focuses on high wind speeds
and earthquakes, using probability to describe the negligence of current systems regarding
low rise buildings. Because buildings will most likely not go through extreme weather
conditions (at least not often) they are not built to withstand them. While they are built to
survive a small earthquake or tropical storm a hurricane can easily destroy one. The
mandatory checks overlook significant design flaws if the flawed components are not directly
related, nor does it account for a domino effect like scenario, where one instability leads to
another.5 While they are referring to low rise buildings which have a fairly low potential to do
harm low and medium rise buildings often surround high-rises and definitely have an effect
on them. In the same sense the high rise building has an effect on the surrounding buildings,

1
Ellingwood, B. R., Rosowsky, D. V., Li, Y., & Kim, J. H., Fragility assessment of
light-frame wood construction subjected to wind and earthquake hazards.
2
Ibid.
3
Chen, X., & Kareem, A., Dynamic wind effects on buildings with 3D coupled modes:
application of high frequency force balance measurements.
4
Ellingwood, B. R., Rosowsky, D. V., Li, Y., & Kim, J. H., Fragility assessment of
light-frame wood construction subjected to wind and earthquake hazards.
5
Ibid.
and weather they make natural disasters more or less dangerous should be considered
during the planning process.

III. Project Description (contextualization and significance of project)

Timeline:
- 7 week project
- Week 1 and 2
- Set up the necessary equipment, print buildings, create rotating floor
- Modify buildings with accelerometer and piezoelectric strips
- Week 3
- Preliminary testing focusing on feasibility of project
- Fix bugs
- Outliers in data
- Inconsistencies
- Multiple trials
- Week 4 and 5
- Testing
- Data collection
- Constant checking for bugs
- Week 6 and 7
- Data analysis
- Creation of trends and conclusions
- Analysis of data quality
- Standard of deviation
Goals:
- Objective 1: Find relationship between proximity of highrises and their effect on the
forces that cause.
 - Objective 2: Find effects of medium and low rise buildings on high-rise buildings.
- Objective 3: Find the effects of high-rise buildings on medium and low-rise buildings.
- Objective 4: Come up with comprehensive set of potential guidelines that cover most
critical aspects of data and account for more variables than the current code.

IV. Research Strategy

This project uses a rotating base in conjunction with 3D printed parts of varying size in
a wind tunnel, in order to simulate a realistic environmental scenario. This project however
would focus less on the effects of wind on one building, but rather would focus on the quality
of the effects based on a varying surrounding area. The system would use accelerometers
and force sensors to measure the effect on the it as an individual building, however the data
would not be comparing angle and wind speed, but how the change in surroundings might
affect the turbulence, resonance, etc... To do this we will use a variety of 3d printed buildings
with no sensors at all and swap them out to create different environments. Doing this limits
the amount of data coming in making it simpler to make conclusions however would require
more speculation in order to create usable guidelines. The addition of a sensor that detects
turbulence would most likely be necessary, such as a piezoelectric beam that works in
tandem with a Hot Wire Probe. While this will help to limit the amount of speculation it will
also ad a lot of data to sift through so it should definitely be done sparingly.

V. Bibliography
Ellingwood, B. R., Rosowsky, D. V., Li, Y., & Kim, J. H. (2004). Fragility assessment of
light-frame wood construction subjected to wind and earthquake hazards. Journal of
Structural Engineering, 130(12), 1921-1930.

Allaei, D., & Andreopoulos, Y. (2014). INVELOX: Description of a new concept in wind power
and its performance evaluation. Energy, 69, 336-344.
Chen, X., & Kareem, A. (2005). Dynamic wind effects on buildings with 3D coupled modes:
application of high frequency force balance measurements. Journal of engineering
mechanics, 131(11), 1115-1125.