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. Since crosswind loading is highly sensitive to shape, a wind tunnel program focusing on shape changes could be very worthwhile. To reduce building responses to wind, supplementary damping devices are increasingly being used. For a building with responses varying with wind speed to power three or four–which is possible when crosswind response governs—a load factor as high as two or above may be needed to achieve the normal target level of structural reliability.
