Probabilistic assessment of high-rise buildings with fluid viscous dampers under hurricane wind loads

Abstract

Current wind design codes incorporate turbulence through gust factors and rely on historical wind data, including tropical cyclones. While generally conservative, standard code wind profiles and spectra do not fully reproduce the vertical distribution and dynamic characteristics of hurricane winds, particularly in the supergradient region near the eyewall, and can sometimes underestimate tail risks, low-probability, high-impact events, as observed during Hurricane Otis in Acapulco (2023). This study probabilistically evaluates wind-induced vibrations in high-rise buildings with different lateral resisting systems equipped with fluid viscous dampers (FVDs), under non-tropical storm and tropical cyclone conditions. Along-wind loads were modeled in the time domain as stationary, multidimensional stochastic processes and analyzed using one million Monte Carlo simulations and Incremental Dynamic Analysis on the DelftBlue supercomputer. Statistical distributions of responses, bivariate dependence via copulas, and fragility curves were obtained. Results show that wind type, structural deformation mode, and damper properties significantly affect response distributions, correlation structures, and failure probabilities. FVDs effectively reduce structural dynamic response, improving serviceability, while increased shear stiffness further reduces fragility. Modeling hurricane winds as non-tropical storms can overestimate damper effectiveness. These findings provide insights for refining wind codes and designing high-rise buildings that remain safe and functional under extreme events.