Recent trends towards developing increasingly taller and irregularly-shaped buildings have led to slender complex structures that are highly sensitive and susceptible to wind-induced deflection and vibration. In the design of this new generation of tall buildings, structural engineers are facing the challenge of striving for the most efficient and economical design solution while ensuring that the final design must be serviceable for its intended function, habitable for its occupants and safe over its design life-time. The emerging performance-based design concept provides a general framework for solving the optimal serviceability design problems. This research aims to develop an innovative computer-based design method for optimal performance-based design of tall buildings achieving a s...[ Read more ]

Recent trends towards developing increasingly taller and irregularly-shaped buildings have led to slender complex structures that are highly sensitive and susceptible to wind-induced deflection and vibration. In the design of this new generation of tall buildings, structural engineers are facing the challenge of striving for the most efficient and economical design solution while ensuring that the final design must be serviceable for its intended function, habitable for its occupants and safe over its design life-time. The emerging performance-based design concept provides a general framework for solving the optimal serviceability design problems. This research aims to develop an innovative computer-based design method for optimal performance-based design of tall buildings achieving a satisfactory and reliable performance in various extreme and hazard wind loading conditions. The outcome of this research will provide a powerful computer-automated design tool for optimal performance-based design to deliver cost-effective low-risk design solutions for tall buildings in a typhoon-prone city, such as Hong Kong.

This thesis firstly develops a coupled dynamic analysis method for predicting the wind-induced complex motions of buildings. The equivalent static wind load approach is built on the results of dynamic analysis and is integrated into the stiffness design optimization of tall buildings subject to static drift and dynamic acceleration serviceability design criteria. The dynamic optimization problem has also been solved in the time domain with the aid of time history analysis. Furthermore, the uncertainty due to inherent variability in wind-induced random vibrations has been modeled and quantified in terms of peak factors based on statistical analysis of peak responses and the statistics of extremes. The time-variant reliability of wind-induced motions in tall buildings is then analyzed using the peak response distributions. Finally, a general reliability performance-based design optimization framework for the dynamic serviceability design of tall buildings is developed taking into due account of the major uncertainties in both wind loadings and the dynamic characteristics of structural systems. Numerous examples and practical applications are presented in relevant chapters to demonstrate the efficiency and practicality of the proposed automated reliability performance-based design optimization method.