Full-Aeroelastic Model of CAARC Building: Iterative Design Procedure and Wind Tunnel Tests

A first step of a broader framework, concerning the investigation of tall buildings’ dynamic response to wind load, is presented. In order to accomplish this challenging task, a well-known benchmark has been selected: the CAARC (Commonwealth Advisory Aeronautical Research Council) standard tall building. Decades of literatures on the subject make it the perfect candidate to tackle the complexity of wind-structure interaction phenomena. The present work concerns the design of a full-aeroelastic multi degrees of freedom model. The configuration proposed by J. Holmes at International Conference on Wind Engineering (2007), accounting for both flexural and torsional decoupled modes of vibrations, is adopted. A design theory present in literature is re-proposed, from a different prospective, in a semi-automated fashion through a Python script. At last, preliminary results are shown, demonstrating the method’s efficiency and applicability, not only to tall buildings, but more generally to structures with continuous distribution of mass.