Control of tall buildings response by aerodynamic appendages

The difficulties and uncertainties in modeling tall buildings and wind forces has led to a new technique to control the vibration of flexible structures. This technique consists in applying feedback control forces to control the building response in order to keep the structure safe and serviceable under all random wind loading conditions. One of the main problems to practically apply this technique is to minimize the cost of energy consumed to generate and operate the control forces. A proposal to achieve this goal is to use active appendages at the top of the building such that the appendages are deployed or folded upon the building response to the wind. In this way, the appendages create some control forces from the wind itself to minimize the building vibration. The design of the appendage movement has been considered by Klein et al in 1972, and recently by Soong and Skinner in 1981. This paper introduces a better design for the appendages movement, which is compared with the previous methods.