Resilience-Based Wind Assessment of Archetypal Tall Reinforced-Concrete Buildings in India

Traditional prescriptive wind design requires the Main Wind Force Resisting System (MWFRS) to stay elastic, conflicting with performance-based seismic approaches. The new ASCE Pre-standard for performance-based wind design introduces limit states allowing controlled nonlinearity in the MWFRS above the elastic limit. This supports wind resilience moving past structural safety to include serviceability, functionality, and recovery after extreme wind events. This study investigates the wind performance of two archetypal 25-storey RC office buildings representative of modern tall structures on the Indian west coast, a region characterised by high basic wind speed of 50 m/s. The buildings, designed according to IS875, are doubly symmetric in plan and regular in elevation and consist of a dual system of shear walls and moment-resisting frames. One building is on a site with a 0.24g PGA, making its design earthquake-governed, while the other is on a 0.16g PGA site, leading to its design being wind-governed. Detailed 3D models are developed in SAP2000, and the buildings are subjected to suites of wind tunnel-derived alongwind and crosswind excitations. Wind IDAs are performed to determine their response at and beyond the design level. Performance objectives and acceptance criteria for wind are mapped to admissible damage states, defined according to the ASCE Pre-standard. The resilience of the buildings is evaluated adopting the FEMA P-58 methodology and its PACT tool for wind to estimate probabilistic damage, functionality loss, and recovery time. The study concludes by discussing the implications of prescriptive design on actual wind performance and demonstrating the potential benefits of performance-based approaches for tall buildings in high-wind regions, while contributing to the broader discourse on wind resilience through considerations of serviceability, functionality, and recovery capacity.