The Fifth International Symposium on Computational Wind Engineering (CWE2010) Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA May 23-27, 2010 Database-Assisted Design for Wind Effects on High-Rise Structures and Its Potential for Assessment of CFD Simulation DongHun Yeo, Emil Simiu National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, U.S.A. donghun.yeo@nist.gov , emil.simiu@nist.gov ABSTRACT: Efforts are being made to perform CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics)-based estimates of wind effects on tall buildings that are sufficiently reliable to allow their use in lieu of estimates based on wind tunnel measurements. For practical purposes the assessment of the quality of the CFD simulation should be based on the adequacy of the simulation of the wind ef- fects induced in the structure by the CFD aerodynamic data, rather than on the precision with which the various parameters that define the oncoming atmospheric boundary layer wind flow are reproduced. This approach requires a capability for estimating dynamic structural response induced by simulated CFD pressures that is effective and transparent. The paper briefly describes such a capability, referred to as database-assisted design, and its potential application in the con- text of CFD-based pressure time histories simulation. An illustration of the use of pressure time histories to estimate structural wind effects on tall buildings is presented with reference to a 60- story reinforced concrete structure. 1 INTRODUCTION The quality of the CFD simulation of pressure time histories depends upon the extent to which the various flow parameters that define the atmospheric flow are adequately reproduced. Howev- er, it should be kept in mind that the objective of the simulation is to determine structural re- sponse to wind. The significance of deviations of the flow parameters from “true” flow parame- ters needs to be judged in terms of this objective. Therefore, to establish metrics on the degree to which various deviations are acceptable it is necessary to estimate the sensitivity to such devia- tions of the structural wind effects of interest. This requires in turn the effective, realistic, and transparent estimation of those effects. In this paper we present a procedure, referred to as data- base-assisted design (DAD), for achieving such estimation. Given the synchronous time histories of simulated pressures at a large number of points on the exterior surface of a given structure, the procedure automatically determines the values of the demand-to-capacity indexes, the inter-story drift, and the top floor accelerations corresponding to mean recurrence intervals (MRIs) speci- fied in standards and codes. In view of interactions among the atmospheric flow parameters sen- sitivity studies to be conducted in the future should in our opinion be based on experiment design techniques (see, e.g., Filliben and Simiu (2010)), rather than on the considerably less reliable one-factor-at-a time methods. The paper is organized as follows. In the next section we describe the DAD procedure used to determine the building dynamic response under given synchronous pressure time histories ob- tained at a large number of points on the external surface of the building envelope. Using wind tunnel data, we then demonstrate the application of the procedure to the CAARC (Common- wealth Aeronautical Advisory Research Council) standard tall building, a structure commonly