The increasing height and greater structural efficiency of tall buildings have led to their having smaller

reserves of stiffness and. consequently. stability. A check on; the effects of this reduction in stability has
become an imponant part of the building design process.

In considering stability. that of the structure as a whole. as well as that of individual members that make
up the building. must be examined. However. the design for stability of individual columns is the same
for high-rise buildings as for low-rise structures. and this aspect is usually covered by national Design
Code requirements, This discussion on stability is. therefore. concerned with the whole Structure. or
with whole stories of the structure. rather than with individual members

In its overall behavior a high-rise structure resembles a cantilever column moderate slenderness ratio.
differs, however, from a typical structural column. which is essentially a flexural element. by including
the poss'bility of a significant. or even a dominant. shear flexibility. Consequently. the potential modes
of overall buckling include only a flexural mode (Fig. 16. la) but, altematively. a shear mode (Fig. 16, 1b),
or. quite possibly. a combination of both these modes (Fig.' 16. lc). Funthermore. these mode shapes
might occur not only in transverse buckling of the structure, but in torsional or transverse-torsional
forms of buckling. The gravity load on a high-rise stmcture is usually a small proportion the load that
would be required to cause overall buckling, Consequently, the sibility of collapse in this way is remote.
The more serious stability consideration concerns the second-order effects Of gravity loading acting on
transverse displace' rnents caused by horizontal loading. or acting on initial vertical misalignments in the
sructure. The vertical eccentricity of the gravity loading causes increases in the transverse displacements
and in the member In an extreme case this so-called P-Delta effect may be sufficient to initiate collapse.
Usually, however, the P-Delta effects are either small and may be neglected. or of only moderate
magnitude. in which case they can be accommodated by small increases in the Sizes Of the members,
Nevertheless, in the design Of any high-rise building, it is prudent to assess Whether P-Delta effects may
be significant and. if so. to account for them in the analysis and design.

In this chapter, methods Of analysis for buckling and for P-Delta effects are presented,

Methods for the determination of the overall buckling load arc included because first. it indicates an
upper for critical gravity load. second. it allows an assessment of the relative vulnerability of the building
to transverse buckling or torsional buckling. and third. it may be used, in a structure for an which an
approx. P-De1ta analysis is appropriate. to evaluate an amplitication for the displacements and
moments

Shear mode

This mode of buckling occurs in moment resistant frames as a result of story sway associated with
double bending of the columns and girders. Any effects of axial deformations of the columns are
neglected in this approximate method. it is shown in Section 16.3.S that the story drift in a frame.
including the second-order effectsts of gravity loading 16. ll. can be estimated by

in which. with suffix i referring to story i. Oj is the first-order story drift caused by the external shear Qi,.
Pi, is the gravity loading carried by the columns in the story. and hi is the story height.

The loss Of stability is indicated approximately by a zero denominator in Eq.

(16. l). in which case the displacement gamma becomes infinite, Then

which gives the critical load in the shear mode as

It is shown in Chapter 7. Eq. (7.19). that the lateral stiffness of story i may written as

in which Ci = E ( for which the summation is carried out over ail columns (of inertias and height h) in
story i, and G, for which the summation includes all the girders (Of inertias and lengths L ) in the floor at
the top of story i.

Substituting Eq. (16.4) into ( 16.3) gives the following expression for the critical load in a typical story i
entirely in Of the Story members dimensions and properties

Special consideration should be given to the first story of a frame. which. if it has rigid base connections,
can be shown from Eq (7.20) to have a buckling load equal to

or. if the frame has effectively pinned base connections. can be shown from Eq, (7.2 i) to have a buckling
load equal to

This mode presumes the entire structure buckles as flexural cantilever by axial defortmations of the
columns. The greater the slendemess of a structure. the more vulnerable it becomes to instability in the
flexural mode as opposed to the shear mode

The buckling load is a function of the moment of inertia of the cantilever, which is taken as the second
moment of the column sectional areas about their common centroid, Assuming this moment of inertia
to vary in the frarne from a' the base to 10( 1 — d) at the top, in order to allow for the reduction in the
sizes of the columns up the height. an energy analysis with a slight modification to calibrate for the
uniform rnember case yields 16. II

where PoCr, is the critical total gnvigy load on the Structure and H is the total height Of the Structure

16.1.3 Combined Shear and Flexural Modes

For cases in which a combination of Shear and flexural modes may contribute to buckling. an analogy is
drawn With the case of the buckling of a vertical cantilever with a gravity load at its top. fot which the
following solution exists
in which Pr. and are the critical loads for tire combined. flexural, and shear modes of buckling.
respectively.

Applying the analogy to the case of distributed gravity loading gives

in which and PO, are the critical loads in the base story for the combined. flexural. and shear modes Of
buckling. respectively.

This very approximate approach is suggested as being useful for the preliminary stages of design and for
assessing the importance of the flexural relative to the usually donunant shear mode of buckling 116, I l.

16.2 OVERALL BUCKLING ANALYSIS OF WALL-FRAMES

Equations (16.5) to (16.10) provide very approximate estimates of the overall buckling load of a
structure in the shear. flexure. and combined shear—flexure modes. A more rigorous analysis for plan-
symmetric. uniforrn wall—frarne st tures provides solutions for the buckling loads of frame structures at
one extreme. shear wall structures at the other. and any combination of shear walls and franrs in
between 116.2. 16.31,

16.2. I Analytical Method

The method assumes the properties of the structure to be uniforn. and the applied gravity loading to be
distributed uniformly throughout the height (Fig. 16.2a). Representing the walls collectively by a flexural
cantilever. thc frames by a shear cantilever. and their connections by a stiff linking medium distributed
uniformly over the height (Fig. 16.2b). differential equations forequiiibrium were formulated

and solved to determine the critical buckling load. Solutions to these differential equations obtained for
a wide practical range of frame-to-wall relative stiff. nesses 116.31,

Although the analyses are complex and too lengthy to justify presentation here, 'beir results permit both
the transverse and the torsional critical loads of a wallframe strucu•re to be calculated relatively si mply
by the procedure outlined below.

Consider the doubly symmetric structure in Fig. 16.3. in which the walls and rigid frames are aligned
with the principal X and Y axes.

in which C, and G, are as defined for Eq. (16.4).

Walls and frames that are skew to the X and Y axes can be accommodated in the analysis by including
their respective components of stiffness in the above totals.

3. Determine the torsional rigidities for the walls and G", for the frames. For the walls:

in which x is the distance from a wall or frame aligned in the Y direction to the center of twist, and is the
corresponding distance of a wall or frame aligned in the X direction.

Since torsional buckling is influenced not only by the plan distribution Of the structural components but
also by that of the gravity loading. a weight distribution parameter is required and is defined by

in which the floor loading is represented asa set of loads p at distance from the center of rotation.

4, The transverse and torsional stiffnessesobtained from Eqs, (16, 11 and 16, 14) are then used to obtain
the following transverse and characteristic parameters:

S. The three parameters (a H) above are used to find the corresponding coeficients s.. s, € and from
Table 16. that enable the calculation of critical loads

The critical gravity loads for transverse buckling are given by

These critical loads will shown to useful also for evaluating an amplihcation factor to give an estimate of
the P-DeIta effects.