Adaptive control of the unsteady loading on a high-rise building*

The flow around a high-rise building determines its unsteady wind loading. In this work, the flow structures around a benchmark high-rise building are numerically investigated using Large Eddy Simulation (LES). Different from the finite cylinder in the uniform flow, such buildings protrude into the atmospheric boundary layer, significantly affecting the wake structures. The coherent flow structures are given and the switching process between antisymmetric and symmetric vortex shedding modes are analyzed in detail. To attenuate the unsteady loading, an adaptive control strategy is designed. The control is based on an IIR filter, its coefficients being optimised by the LMS algorithm, and an efficient method to overcome the IIR instability is implemented. This adaptive controller is then implemented in numerical simulations where its performance gets assessed.