ABSTRACT

Linked Buildings (LBs) often stand close to each other and have great heights, so wind-resistance is one of the primary concerns in design practice, particularly in typhoon-prone areas. When two buildings are separate, they vibrate independently in response to wind excitation, whereas when there are links between them, the links can couple the motions of the connected buildings by transferring internal forces (i.e., structural coupling) and the two connected buildings work as a whole to resist external wind forces. As a result, wind forces on all the connected buildings should be taken into consideration simultaneously to accurately reflect the true nature of wind-excited LBs and calculate the resulting structural responses (Xie & Irwin 2001; Lim & Bienkiewicz 2007; Song & Tse 2014). It is evident that the correlation between wind forces applied to the LBs (i.e., aerodynamic coupling)

structural coupling. This involves summing wind force components of each of the buildings. The inter-building aerodynamic correlation plays an important role in the summation. The correlation between wind force components within each building (i.e. intra-building aerodynamic correlation) is also important because it is related to the combination of the resulting directional structural response. Due to the interaction between wind forces on the LBs, however, the intra-building correlation is likely to be different from that of an isolated building.