Effects of Number of Sides on Aerodynamic Characteristics of Super-Tall Buildings
A series of wind tunnel tests were conducted on 7 super-tall buildings with various polygon cross-sections, including triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, octagon, dodecagon, and circular. The primary purpose of the present study is to investigate the effect of increasing number of sides on aerodynamic characteristics for super-tall buildings. Wind tunnel tests were conducted under the turbulent boundary layers whose power-law exponent is 0.27. Fluctuating wind pressures from more than 200 pressure taps were recorded simultaneously, and time series of overturning moments were calculated considering tributary area of each pressure tap. The results show that the overturning moment coefficients and the spectral values decrease with increasing number of sides, and the largest mean and fluctuating overturning moments were found for the triangular super-tall building, and the largest spectral values were found for the square super-tall building. The analysis should be conducted more in detail, but currently it can be roughly said that there seems to be a little differences in the aerodynamic characteristics for the super-tall buildings whose number of sides is larger than 5 or 6.