Preliminary Analysis and Member Sizing of Tall Tubular Steel Buildings

More and more tall, slender multistory buildings have been designed and built in the last decade. For steel buildings in particular, the present architectural trend is toward the use of light panels with large glass areas. This trend requires the structural steel tube not only to resist all lateral loads to limit the drift to some acceptable values, but also to prevent racking of the glass panels. The analysis of tall steel tubes to account for all the lateral loads has been well established in the literature. Most available commercial computer programs, such as SAPIV, STRUDL II, NASTRAN, etc., are equipped to perform analysis of such systems both accurately and efficiently, but they are costly and time consuming. Therefore, the tendency is to limit their use for the so-called final analysis only. The proposed method of analysis is mainly applicable for rectangular shapes, but it could be extended to more general tubular shapes. Problems involving parameters like shear lag, warping, etc. are currently being studied by the authors