Suraj Nayak

Rapid wall is a prefabricated walling panel with broad construction applications.It is suitable for load-bearing walls for individual domestic cottages as well as for multi-storey residential buildings; formwork for suspended concrete floor structures and for most other purposes for which traditional building materials are currently used. Rapid wall is manufactured in a moulding process using glass-fibre reinforced, water-resistant gypsum plaster and water proofing additives. All panels are up to 12 meters long and 3 meters high. The panels are cellular in form and 124 millimeters thick. The formed cells can be used to accommodate building services such as plumbing and electrical conduits or they can be filled with insulation, for increased thermal performance, or with concrete for increased load bearing structural capacity.

Wind loads on structures under the buffeting action of wind gusts have traditionally been treated by the ‘‘gust loading factor’’ (GLF) method in most major codes and standards around the world. In this scheme, the equivalent-static wind loading used for design is equal to the mean wind force multiplied by the GLF. Although the traditional GLF method ensures an accurate estimation of the displacement response, it may fall short in providing a reliable estimate of other response components. To overcome this shortcoming, a more consistentprocedure for determining design loads on tall structures is proposed. This paper highlights an alternative model, in which the GLF is based on the base bending moment rather than the displacement. The expected extreme base moment is computed by multiplying the mean base moment by the proposed GLF. The base moment is then distributed to each floor in terms of the floor load in a format that is very similar to the one used to distribute the base shear in earthquake engineering practice. In addition, a simple relationship between the proposed base moment GLF and the traditional GLF is derived, which makes it convenient to employ the proposed approach while utilizing the existing background information. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed procedure in light of the traditional approach. This paper also extends the new framework for the formulation of wind load effects in the acrosswind and torsional directions along the ‘‘GLF’’ format that has generally been used for the alongwind response.

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