Embodied Carbon Based Integrated Optimal Seismic Design for Super Tall Buildings with Viscoelastic Coupling Dampers

With the development of urban construction and building technology, more and more super tall buildings have been built. Due to its huge material and energy assumption, super tall buildings exert great impact on the environment. Embodied carbon is an important tool to measure the environmental impacts of super tall buildings, including the carbon emissions in the process of raw materials processing, structural member manufacturing and transportation. The embodied carbonof super tall buildings could be optimized by integrating the energy dissipation devices in the structural system. Viscoelastic coupling dampers(VCDs) is a kind of efficient energy dissipation devices. By replacing coupling beams in structural configurations, VCDs can effectively increase the level of inherent damping of structures, and thus reduce the wind-induced and earthquake-induced dynamic vibrations. Since the internal forces of structural members subject to lateral loads can also be reduced due to additional damping introduced by VCDs, optimization for the sectional dimension of structural components is made possible, accompanied by reductions to embodied carbon. Embodied carbon based integrated structural design method is introduced in this paper to minimize the embodied carbon of structures by integrating the VCDs. A super tall building located in high seismicity area is presented as an example to illustrate the proposed integrated optimal design method. The design case analysis results for a real super tall building project show that the proposed method is reasonable and can effectively reduce embodied carbon and total cost of super tall buildings. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.