Abstract
For most of recent tall buildings, one characteristic is that their building shapes vary with height such as taper and setback, and this implies that the distribution of their structural components may also vary with height. Because of these structural variations, although the sectional shapes of these buildings are symmetric, it is difficult to say whether or not they are structurally symmetric. The acceleration responses of structurally asymmetric tall buildings are larger than those of non-eccentric buildings, thus raising the possibility of problems during strong winds and typhoons. This paper describes wind tunnel tests carried out using building models with height variations and acceleration response analyses, and discusses the resulting response characteristics. For tapered and setback buildings, although the across-wind accelerations are larger than those of a square building, the total root-mean-square accelerations remain small because of smaller along-wind and torsional rms accelerations. And it was found that the effects of statistical couplings between along-wind force and other two forces are negligible.