Optimum Locations of Outriggers in a Concrete Tall Building to Reduce Differential Axial Shortening

Differential axial shortening (DAS) in a tall building can produce adverse effects on its structural and nonstructural elements. Therefore, DAS should be considered in the design phase and appropriate measures should be taken to reduce its unfavorable effects. In this study, the utilization of outriggers, which has been originally designed to reduce lateral displacements, is proposed to reduce DAS. The optimum locations of outriggers that minimize the maximum DAS are determined by an optimization method. The integrality requirement posed by the outrigger locations, which should be given as integer numbers, is resolved by piecewise quadratic interpolation with discrete analysis results. The proposed optimization method stably yielded optimum solutions for a total of 24 design cases. The optimum design results show that although the maximum DAS decreases as the number of outriggers increases, the maximum DAS does not decrease significantly when the number of outriggers is greater than 2.