Equivalent Static Wind Loads: Recent developments and analysis of a suspended roof

Equivalent Static Wind Loads (ESWLs) represent an extremely useful tool for the characterization of the structural response to the wind action and provide a convenient way for structural engineers in order to include the results of a complete, rigorous, buffeting analysis in the design process. Recently, a novel approach to the determination of ESWLs has been proposed which is based on the adoption of Proper Skin Modes for the characterization of the static/quasi-static structural response. In that study, the reconstruction of the extreme internal forces over the structure for all structural members has been performed in a least square sense and a smoothed version of the maximum/minimum operators, typical of envelope calculations, has been adopted. By using such formulation, it is possible to use efficient, gradient-based, optimization techniques in the minimization procedure which leads to the identification of ESWLs. In this paper, two refinements of the original technique are proposed: the least square approach is modified in order to ensure a complete covering of the envelope and the original formulation is extended in order to take into consideration the contemporaneity between effects. Finally, the proposed approach is tested on a large span suspended roof derived from the structural model of the New Juventus Stadium showing extremely encouraging results.