Wind tunnel and full-scale study of wind effects on China’s tallest building

The Jin Mao Building with a height of 420.5 m and 88-storeys, located in Shanghai, is the highest tall building in Mainland China. This paper presents selected results from a combined wind tunnel and full-scale study of wind effects on the super tall building. In the wind tunnel test, mean and fluctuating force components on the building model for the cases of an isolated Jin Mao Building and the building with existing surrounding condition were measured by a high-frequency force balance technique under suburban and urban boundary layer wind flow configurations, respectively. Force coefficients, power spectral densities, displacement and acceleration responses were then presented and discussed. A detailed comparative study was conducted to investigate the influences of incident wind direction, upstream terrain conditions and interferences from the surroundings on the wind effects on the building. Serviceability of the super tall building under strong wind action was analyzed on the basis of the experimental results. On the other hand, full-scale measurements of wind effects on the Jin Mao Building were conducted under typhoon conditions. The field data, such as wind speed, wind direction and acceleration responses were simultaneously and continuously recorded during the passage of Typhoon Rananim in August, 2004. Analysis of the field data was carried out to investigate typhoon effects on the super tall building. Finally, the wind tunnel test results were found to be in good agreement with the full-scale measurements, illustrating that the wind tunnel tests can provide satisfactory predictions of wind-induced vibrations of the super tall building under typhoon conditions.