ABSTRACT
One of the benefits of wind tunnel tests of tall buildings is that they can assist the designers to arrive at a better optimized structural system through accurate knowledge of the wind loads and the building’s response to them. For buildings where the along-wind response governs the wind loading on the main structural system, the loads from the wind tunnel are quite likely to be similar to, or somewhat less than, those calculated by building code formulae. However, for very tall and slender towers, the crosswind response is often dominant, and the loads may well exceed those from the building code by a substantial margin. Since crosswind loading is highly sensitive to shape, a wind tunnel program focusing on shape changes could be very worthwhile. Also, whereas stiffening a building will invariably reduce along-wind loading, it is possible in rare cases for it to have the opposite effect for crosswind responses.
