Effect of taper on fundamental aeroelastic behaviors of super-tall buildings

Aeroelastic wind tunnel experiments were conducted for conventional and tapered supertall building models to investigate the effect of taper on fundamental aeroelastic behaviors in various incident flows. Three incident flows were simulated: a turbulent boundary-layer flow representing urban area; a low-turbulent flow; and a grid-generated flow. Results were summarized focusing on the effect of taper and the effect of incident flows. The suppression of responses by introducing taper was profound in the low-turbulence flow and boundary-layer flow, but in the grid-generated flow, the response becomes larger than that of the square model when the wind is applied normal to the surface. The effects of taper and incident flows were clearly shown on the normalized responses, power spectra, stability diagrams and probability functions.