Vibration Serviceability of Modular Tall Buildings

Abstract

Modular construction is a relatively innovative construction technique where a building is predominantly made up of a series of prebuilt units, called ‘modules’, which are manufactured in a factory, transported to the site and then joined together to create a larger building. The big advantage to this method of construction is that most of the module interiors/services can be installed in the factory, meaning that on-site construction time is significantly shorter than for conventional construction. Recent numerical studies have developed methods which predict the vibrational response of prefabricated modular tall buildings subjected to the wind loads in its early stages of the design and to provide solutions for controlling the vibrations. A building located in London has been modelled in AXIS VM X4 software and MATLAB code is developed for calculating accelerations of the building through Multi-Modal Analysis and comparing them with the comfort requirements provided by ISO 10137:2007 where peak acceleration limits for tall buildings are provided. Sensitivity analysis has been performed to investigate the impact of various parameters on the peak acceleration of the building.