Smart glass facade subjected to wind loadings

The design of a modern glass facade translates an architectural aspiration for transparency. Innovative technological solutions have made it possible to materialise a transparent planar surface, exploring the load-bearing capabilities of the glass itself. Facades also need to have back-up structures, which are designed to withstand seismic and wind actions. This paper analyses the behaviour of a ‘smart' glass facade, based on a bow-string truss solution, which is able to continuously adapt its shape in order to compensate for the wind dynamic displacements, affecting the structural appearance. The wave superposition method is used to generate samples of the wind distributions, using sinusoidal functions. A proportional–integral–derivative control strategy enables a significant reduction of the displacements shown by the facade during wind events. This design approach yields an optimised structural solution in terms of weight, allowing the materialisation of a very light facade.