Aerodynamic behavior of supertall buildings with three-fold rotational symmetric plan shapes: A case study

Many factors should be considered by architects and designers for designing a tall building. Wind load is one of these important factors that govern the design of tall building structures and can become a serious challenge when buildings tend to be built very tall and slender. On the other hand, through the initial stages of a design process, choosing the design geometry greatly affects the wind-induced forces on a tall building. With this respect, geometric shapes with 3-fold rotational symmetry are one of the applied plan shapes in tall buildings. This study, therefore, aims to investigate the aerodynamic characteristics of 8 different geometrical shapes using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) by measuring the drag and lift forces. A case study approach was conducted in which different building shape models have the same total gross area and the same height of 300 meters. The simulation was an incompressible transient flow that ran 1700 timesteps (85 seconds on the real-time scale). The results show a great difference between wind-induced force performance of buildings with different plan shapes. Generally, it is stated that the shapes with the same area, but with smaller perimeters, are better choices for reducing the drag force on buildings. Applying the lift force, the results show that the buildings with plan shapes that have rounded corners act better in crosswind flow while, those with sharp corners induce larger forces in the same direction. This study delivers more analytical understanding of building shapes and their behavior against the wind force through the parametric modelling.