Structural Analysis of High-rise Buildings under Horizontal Loads: A Study on the Piedmont Region Headquarters Tower in Turin

Background: When a high-rise building is designed, the main aim is to limit transversal displacements. In addition, when vertical bracings, made up of thin open sections, are subjected to external torsion, warping and secondary torsional moment stresses arise which need to be evaluated using Vlasov’s Theory. Objective: This work analyzes the Piedmont Region Headquarters Tower, using an analytical formulation which enables the calculation of structural displacements and stresses. Methods: The analytical formulation used in the static and dynamic analysis of the structure was implemented using Matlab computation code. A computational model was also created using a commercial Finite Element Code to validate the results. Results: The results obtained with the analytical model were compared with those obtained with the FEM model. The transversal displacements, bending, torsional, and axial stresses in the vertical bracings were calculated, along with the principal natural frequencies of the structure. Conclusion: It has been proved that analytical calculation codes are a good tool for the preliminary design of a high-rise building. In particular, the proposed formulation, which has only three degrees of freedom per floor, provided results similar to those obtained using a FEM model. The great advantage of this analytical code is to speed up the computation time, which is proportional to the square of the degrees of freedom. In a FEM model, these have orders of magnitude greater than in the analytical model. Moreover, the proposed formulation allows the load distribution between the structural elements to be determined.