Identification of Wind Loads on Supertall Buildings Using Kalman Filtering–Based Inverse Method

Abstract

A Kalman filtering–based inverse method for identification of wind forces on supertall buildings is proposed. The new approach allows simultaneously estimating the wind loads and entire wind-induced responses of a supertall building using only a limited set of measurements. The effectiveness and good accuracy of the proposed algorithm are validated with experimental results. The wind loads acting on a supertall building are estimated based on the wind-induced responses determined from wind-tunnel testing. The stability of the proposed algorithm is evaluated. The effects of several key factors such as measurement noise, errors of structural modal parameters, and covariance matrix of noise on the identification accuracy are examined and discussed using the L-curve method. Finally, the identified wind loads on the supertall building based on field-measured displacements were compared with the wind-tunnel testing results to further verify the effectiveness of the inverse technique.