Deterministic Wind Load Dynamic Analysis of High Rise Steel Buildings Including P-Delta Effects

This study concerns with the investigation of the second-order geometric nonlinearity effects of P-Delta analysis on the dynamic response of high rise steel buildings due to deterministic wind load. Linear and nonlinear time history analyses were conducted to analyze different tall steel building models adopted in the study. Five steel building models ranging from 10 to 50 stories were numerically modeled and analyzed using finite element code ETABS (version 16.0.3). Deterministic dynamic wind load per ASCE 7-10 is applied to the buildings as a main lateral load. Comparative study between linear and nonlinear time history analyses reveals that nonlinear time history analysis including P-Delta effects displayed larger values of buildings lateral sway than those of linear time history analysis. Generally, including P-Delta effect in the nonlinear analysis increases the flexibility of the building structure, and thus increases response peak values and that peak values occur at a longer time periods indicating lesser response oscillations. The study recommends that P-Delta effect need to be addressed by any dynamic wind analysis for tall steel buildings with 20 story height or more.