| Vol. - No. | Vol.2 - No.3 |
|---|---|
| Date | Sep., 2013 |
| Title | Editor's Note |
| Contents |
With recent trends toward tall and super-tall buildings, buildings are becoming lighter and slenderer, making them increasingly vulnerable to winds. Furthermore, their shapes are becoming more complicated and simple rectangular sections are becoming rare. As is well-known, crosswind responses due to periodic Karman vortex shedding is predominant over along-wind and torsional responses for tall buildings. Therefore, a very important goal for the design is to prevent well-organized formation of periodic Karman vortices in the wake regions of tall buildings, and unconventional complicated configurations have advantages on aerodynamic and response characteristics to realize the goal. Unlike seismic actions, wind actions can last for several hours, and building designers should consider not only structural safety against wind excitations but also habitability problems due to wind-induced responses. In addition, there is almost no city where a tall building stands alone. Building engineers designing tall buildings in urban areas around the world always encounter problems related to a number of issues including interference effects, human comfort problems, and so on. The importance of wind engineering is recently becoming increasingly significant in tall- and super-tallbuilding design. In this context, this special issue on wind engineering is very timely and useful for building engineers, and should help to solve many difficult issues in wind-resistant design of tall buildings. |