Seismic design of outrigger systems for tall buildings

Abstract

Outrigger systems are an effective structural scheme that is commonly used in high-rise construction to increase stiffness and distribute the moment demand within the core to the exterior columns. Despite the on-going use of outrigger structural systems around the world, a formal seismic design procedure for outrigger system is missing. This thesis presents an equivalent energy-based design procedure (EEDP) to design outrigger systems for seismic applications. Using the concept of an energy balance, elastic single degree of freedom systems are equated to equivalent nonlinear systems, and plastic mechanisms are used to derive design forces for the outrigger systems. EEDP allows engineers to design the outrigger-wall buildings to achieve different performance objectives at different seismic hazard levels, which is desirable for creating earthquake-resilient buildings. Three prototype outrigger-wall buildings of various heights were designed using the proposed procedure for a hypothetical site in Vancouver, Canada. Detailed finite element models were developed using OpenSees to assess the seismic performance of the prototype buildings. The results of the nonlinear time history analyses show that the prototypes can meet the performance objectives specified during the design procedure. Lastly, incremental dynamic analyses were conducted using the FEMA P695 methodology to quantify the seismic safety of outrigger systems designed using EEDP. The results show that the proposed EEDP is an effective method to design outrigger systems, where the structure can achieve sufficient margin of safety against collapse and satisfy multiple performance objectives at different hazard levels without iteration.