Design of a mega-sub-controlled building system under stochastic wind loads

Vibration control of high-rise buildings under wind loads with application of the mega-sub-control method is studied in this paper. A building with a megasub-configuration consists of two major structural components - a megastructure as the main structural frame and several sub-structures for residential and/or commercial usage. The authors have previously proposed a ‘megasub-control method’ in which the sub-structures are designed to serve as vibration control dampers. The control objective is to suppress certain critical building responses such as inter-story drifts of the mega-structure for the purpose of structural safety and acceleration response of the sub-structures for the purpose of protecting contents and improving human comfort. The feasibility of this method has been explored by the authors in previous publications. In this study, the procedure of optimally designing dynamic parameters of a megasub-controlled building under stochastic wind loads is developed, together with two possible structural configurations which provide a mega-sub-control mechanism. The mega-structure of a mega-sub-building is modeled as a cantilever beam to retain the dominant bending mode characteristics of highrise buildings, and the sub-structure as a shear building to retain the shear mode. The fluctuating wind speed is modeled as a non-white random process in both time and space domains. The power spectral density (PSD) of critical building responses is obtained using the random vibration theory. The mean square value (MSV) of those responses, as functions of the dynamic parameters including the stiffness and damping ratio of the sub-structures, are evaluated from their PSD by numerical integration in the frequency domain. The optimal values of the dynamic parameters are determined by minimizing the MSV of certain critical building responses. An example building is used to demonstrate the design procedure and the numerical simulation of the response quantities in the time domain is carried out to verify the MSV of the building responses obtained from the random vibration theory in the frequency domain. The results show that the proposed design procedure is suitable to apply to a mega-sub-building with different sub-structural configurations. The MSV obtained from the random vibration theory in the frequency domain and from the numerical simulation in the time domain exhibit an excellent agreement. It is also found that the megasub-control method is robust in the sense that slight change in the dynamic parameters affects the building's performance very little. With the design procedure developed, and the corresponding favorable building response demonstrated, this paper has enhanced the feasibility of application of the mega-sub-control method to actual high-rise buildings for wind vibration suppression.