Modeling wind load on tapered high-rise buildings

High-rise buildings are often tapered at their peaks due to wind load reduction considerations.

Without effective aerodynamic optimizations, high-rise buildings exhibit low natural frequency and damping, the former being the rate at which a structure vibrates when disturbed, and the latter being the ability to reduce vibrations. These qualities make high-rise buildings sensitive to wind loads, compromising the safety and comfort of occupants.

Research has explored wind loads on tall buildings with certain tapered shapes, but most fail to account for ground roughness and include wind load estimation equations. To fill these research gaps, Han et al. systematically investigated the aerodynamic forces of tapered high buildings by testing models.

They constructed rigid square models with differing taper ratios and ground roughness, replicating high-rise buildings. They then performed synchronous multi-pressure scanning system tests under four distinct turbulent boundary layers in a wind tunnel.

“The influence of the ground roughness on the fluctuating wind load gradually decreases as the taper ratio increases in across-wind and torsional directions, indicating that the influences of ground roughness and taper ratio are not independent,” said author Guohui Shen. “We have also proposed the estimated equations of the base wind load coefficients with considerations to the influence of taper ratio and ground roughness.”

The authors plan to continue improving the translation of aerodynamic optimization techniques into architectural engineering design.

“Currently, an empirical model for the power spectral density of base wind load in tapered high-rise buildings has not been established,” said Shen. “We aim to initiate communication and collaboration with more scholars through this work to further improve aerodynamic optimization for high-rise buildings.”

Source: “Experimental investigation on the aerodynamic characteristics of tapered high-rise buildings under atmospheric boundary layer conditions,” by Kanghui Han, Guohui Shen, and Shice Yu, Physics of Fluids (2025). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0252864 .