• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
• /
• v.1 no.1
• /
• pp.37-51
• /
• 2012

New generation of tall and complex buildings systems are now introduced that are reflective of the latest development in materials, design, sustainability, construction, and IT technologies. While the complexity in design is being overcome by the availability and advances in structural analysis tools and readily advanced software, the design of these buildings are still reliant on minimum code requirements that yet to be validated in full scale. The involvement of the author in the design and construction planning of Burj Khalifa since its inception until its completion prompted the author to conceptually develop an extensive survey and real-time structural health monitoring program to validate all the fundamental assumptions mad for the design and construction planning of the tower. The Burj Khalifa Project is the tallest structure ever built by man; the tower is 828 meters tall and comprises of 162 floors above grade and 3 basement levels. Early integration of aerodynamic shaping and wind engineering played a major role in the architectural massing and design of this multi-use tower, where mitigating and taming the dynamic wind effects was one of the most important design criteria established at the onset of the project design. Understanding the structural and foundation system behaviors of the tower are the key fundamental drivers for the development and execution of a state-of-the-art survey and structural health monitoring (SHM) programs. Therefore, the focus of this paper is to discuss the execution of the survey and real-time structural health monitoring programs to confirm the structural behavioral response of the tower during construction stage and during its service life; the monitoring programs included 1) monitoring the tower's foundation system, 2) monitoring the foundation settlement, 3) measuring the strains of the tower vertical elements, 4) measuring the wall and column vertical shortening due to elastic, shrinkage and creep effects, 5) measuring the lateral displacement of the tower under its own gravity loads (including asymmetrical effects) resulting from immediate elastic and long term creep effects, 6) measuring the building lateral movements and dynamic characteristic in real time during construction, 7) measuring the building displacements, accelerations, dynamic characteristics, and structural behavior in real time under building permanent conditions, 8) and monitoring the Pinnacle dynamic behavior and fatigue characteristics. This extensive SHM program has resulted in extensive insight into the structural response of the tower, allowed control the construction process, allowed for the evaluation of the structural response in effective and immediate manner and it allowed for immediate correlation between the measured and the predicted behavior. The survey and SHM programs developed for Burj Khalifa will with no doubt pioneer the use of new survey techniques and the execution of new SHM program concepts as part of the fundamental design of building structures. Moreover, this survey and SHM programs will be benchmarked as a model for the development of future generation of SHM programs for all critical and essential facilities, however, but with much improved devices and technologies, which are now being considered by the author for another tall and complex building development, that is presently under construction.

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.37 no.4
• /
• pp.378-383
• /
• 2013

A butterfly throttle valve has been used to control the brake power of an SI engine by controlling the mass flow-rate of intake air in the induction system. However, the valve has a serious effect on the volumetric efficiency of the engine due to the pressure resistance in the induction system. In this study, a new intake air controlling valve named "Variable Geometry Throttle Valve(VGTV)" is proposed to minimize the pressure resistance in the intake system of an SI engine. The design concept of VGTV is on the application of a venturi nozzle in the air flow path. Instead of change of the butterfly valve angle in the airflow field, the throat width of the VGTV valve is varied with the operating condition of an SI engine. In this numerical study, CFD(computational fluid dynamics) simulation technique was incorporated to have an aerodynamics performance analysis of the two air flow controlling systems; butterfly valve and VGTV and compared the results to know which system has lower pressure resistance in the air intake system. From the result, it was found that VGTV has lower pressure resistance than the butterfly valve. Especially VGTV is effective on the low and medium load operating condition of an SI engine. The averaged pressure resistance of VGTV is about 49.0% lower than the value of the conventional butterfly throttle valve.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
• /
• v.25 no.5
• /
• pp.455-463
• /
• 2012

In this study, we calculate dynamic constrained force of tower top and blade root of a floating offshore wind turbine. The floating offshore wind turbine is multibody system which consists of a floating platform, a tower, a nacelle, and a hub and three blades. All of these parts are regarded as a rigid body with six degree-of-freedom(DOF). The platform and the tower are connected with fixed joint, and the tower, the nacelle, and the hub are successively connected with revolute joint. The hub and three blades are connected with fixed joint. The recursive formulation is adopted for constructing the equations of motion for the floating wind turbine. The non-linear hydrostatic force, the linear hydrodynamic force, the aerodynamic force, the mooring force, and gravitational forces are considered as external forces. The dynamic load at the tower top, rotor shaft, and blade root of the floating wind turbine are simulated in time domain by solving the equations of motion numerically. From the simulation results, the mutual effects of the dynamic response between the each part of the floating wind turbine are discussed and can be used as input data for the structural analysis of the floating offshore wind turbine.