PRESENTATIONS: Super-tall Building Structures in China & High-Performance Seismic Systems

When – Tuesday 2nd May 2017 //

Presentation #1: State of the Art of Tall and Super-tall Building Structures in China

Having a history of 110 years, the modern tall buildings originated from the USA and evolved in the developed countries. Tall buildings are not only the symbol of economic prosperity and social progress but also the combination of traditional engineering and innovative technology. With the rapid economic development in China, tall buildings mushroomed in the past two decades. According to the statistics of Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), 8 of top 15 super-tall buildings currently locate in China. It is estimated that the urban super-tall buildings in China will break through in height, story numbers and amount in the next 20–30 years. This presentation will give the state of the art of tall and super-tall building structures in China.

See below links to the slideshows of the presentation material.

ASG Presentation - State of the Art tall buildings

Presentation #2: Development of High-performance Structural Systems for Seismic Applications

Recent earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand have shown that even the most developed countries with modern building codes still vulnerable to strong earthquake shaking. The issue lies in the fundamental approach in the structural design, where the earthquake energy is absorbed through inelastically deformation of the structural components. This design approach leads to unrecoverable structural damages and hefty social and financial losses. The loss due to earthquake can be minimized using high-performance earthquake resilient structures, where designated structural fuses, analogous to electrical fuses, are used to dissipate the sudden surge of earthquake energy. This design philosophy will achieve higher performance and allowing the structure to recover efficiently and economically after strong earthquake shaking. Innovative earthquake resilient structures has been developed in the past. However, there is a lack of practical design procedure that can be used by engineering design committee. In this presentation, a novel design procedure, named equivalent energy-based design procedure (EEDP) for fused structures in earthquake applications will be presented. EEDP allows engineers to select structure performance objectives when the structure is experiencing different levels of seismic shaking intensities. With the use of the developed methodology, engineers can efficiently select the structural member sizes to achieve the desire structural period, strength and deformation with simple hand calculation without iteration. Hence, it is very practical and useful for the seismic engineering design communities. Two innovative earthquake resilient structures named Linked Column Frame (LCF) and fused truss moment frames (FTMF) are designed using EEDP and presented. Nonlinear dynamic analyses were conducted to examine the performance of these two innovative fused structural systems. The result shows the proposed EEDP methodology is able to achieve the performance defined by the engineer, making this design procedure ideal for practicing engineering community where high-performance structural systems can be developed for seismic applications.

See below links to the slideshows of the presentation material.

ASG Presentation Slides - High Performance Seismic System

About the Speakers:

Prof. Zhou received her doctoral degree from Tongji University in 2005 and worked as a visiting scholar at University of California at Berkeley (2010) and Lehigh University (2014). Currently, she is a professor of structural engineering at College of Civil Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, China. Her research interests lie in earthquake resilience of tall and special buildings, ground motion selection for tall buildings, and structural dynamic testing technology. She proposed the engineered ground motion selection method for tall and special buildings, which has been applied in over twenty super-tall buildings in China. She has developed the similitude theory for dynamic testing that published the book Method and Technology for Shaking Table Model Test of Building Structures. Prof. Zhou’s research has been well recognized. Her research were awarded as Outstanding Paper Award of the 14th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering (2008), Best Paper of the Year of the Structural Design of Tall and Special Buildings (2010), and Frontrunner 5000 Top Articles in Outstanding S&T Journal of China (2014). She served as Feitian Scholars Professor, editor of Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering, and member of ASCE and Shanghai Committee of Building Isolation and Energy Dissipation Technology.

Prof. Yang is a professor and the executive director for the International Joint Research Laboratory of Earthquake Engineering (ILEE). He received his B.Sc. (2001) and M.Sc. (2002) from the University of Buffalo, New York, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006. His researches focus on the improving the structural performance through advanced analytical simulation and experimental testing. He has developed the next-generation performance-based design guidelines (adopted by the Applied Technology Council, the ATC-58 research team) in the United States; developed advanced experimental testing technologies, such as hybrid simulation and nonlinear control of shake table, to evaluate structural response under extreme loading conditions; developed risk-based simulation models for countries in the North and South America and the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) for the counties in the South East Asia. Prof. Yang’s research has been well applied to national and international research and code committees. He has been given over 50 invited speeches in many leading research institutes worldwide. Prof. Yang is one of the 19 voting members of the Standing Committee for Earthquake Design, which is responsible for writing the seismic design provision of the 2020 National Building Code of Canada (NBCC). Prof. Yang is also a committee member of S16, which is responsible for writing the seismic design provision of steel structures in the Canada. Prof. Yang is an active member of the Tall Buildings Initiative Project which has developed seismic design guidelines for tall buildings in the West Coast of United States. Prof. Yang’s work has been well recognized by his colleagues, he is the recipient of the 2014 CISC H.A. Krentz Award (highest research award given by the Canadian Institute of Steel Construction) and the 2011 Kwang-Hua Professor Title from Kwang-Hua Foundation, China.