Mitigation of wind load on tall buildings through aerodynamic modifications: Review

With the advancement in construction and engineering techniques, a pragmatic shift in architectural designs of tall buildings can be observed. The buildings are going taller and unconventional shaped rather than traditional. Generally shape and orientation of the building are determined on the basis of architectural and practical considerations, but the wind-induced excitations encouraged by bluffness of the building shapes cannot be neglected also. To safeguard the functional requirement of tall flexible buildings and to mitigate the excitations, various methods are available. Among these methods, aerodynamic modification techniques are very potent, which affect the mechanism of vortex shedding phenomenon considerably and have got a lot of attention in recent years. Based on the impact of modification on the outer architecture of the building, the aerodynamic modifications are categorized in two groups i.e. minor modifications (corner cut, rounding, chamfer etc.) and major modifications (taper, set-back, twist etc.). The present study comprehensively reviews the recent/past aerodynamic modification techniques applied to high-rise buildings.