Wind-tunnel tests on high-rise buildings: wind modes and structural response

The evaluation of pressure fields acting on slender structures under wind loads is currently performed in experimental aerodynamic tests. For wind-sensitive structures, in fact, the knowledge of global and local wind actions is crucial for design purpose. This paper considers a particular slender structure under wind excitation, representative of most common high-rise buildings, whose experimental wind field on in-scale model was measured in the CRIACIV boundary-layer wind tunnel (University of Florence) for several angles of attack of the wind. It is shown that an efficient reduced model to represent structural response can be obtained by coupling the classical structural modal projection with the so called blowing modes projection, obtained by decomposing the covariance or power spectral density (PSD) wind tensors. In particular, the elaboration of experimental data shows that the first few blowing modes can effectively represent the wind-field when eigenvectors of the PSD tensor are used, while a significantly larger number of blowing modes is required when the covariance wind tensor is used to decompose the wind field.