Safety and serviceability assessment for high-rise tower crane to turbulent winds

Tower cranes are commonly used facilities for the construction of high-rise structures. To ensure their workability, it is very important to analyze their response and evaluate their condition under extreme conditions. This paper proposes a general scheme for safety and serviceability assessment of high-rise tower crane to turbulent winds based on time domain buffeting response analysis. Spatially correlated wind velocity field at the location of the tower crane was first simulated using an algorithm for generating the time domain samples of a stationary, multivariate stochastic process according to some prescribed spectral density matrix. The buffeting forces applied to the structure were computed according to the above-simulated wind velocity fluctuations and the lift, drag, and moment coefficients obtained from a CFD computation. Those spatially correlated loads were then fed into a well calibrated finite element model and the nonlinear time history analysis was conducted to compute structural buffeting response. Compared with structural onsite response measurement, the computed response using the proposed method has good precision. The proposed method is then adopted for analyzing the buffeting response of an in-use tower crane under the design wind speed and the maximum operational wind speed for safety and serviceability assessment.