Prediction of wind pressures on supertall buildings based on proper orthogonal decomposition and machine learning

Detailed wind pressure information plays a critical role in the accurate estimation of wind loads on high-rise buildings, especially for complex-shaped supertall buildings. However, owing to the limited internal space of a scaled building model and the capacity of data-acquisition devices, it is often difficult to acquire the wind pressures at all positions of interest on the entire model in wind tunnel testing. To this end, a novel approach that combines the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) and machine learning (ML) is presented in this paper for the prediction of wind pressure time series (WPTS) on supertall building models in wind tunnel testing. In this approach, the prediction of WPTS is converted into the estimation of several main eigenmodes and mean wind pressures by combining the POD with ML. This strategy can effectively reduce the computational effort compared to the direct prediction of WPTS. A combined ML model consisting of the Gaussian process regression (GPR), decision tree regression (DTR), and random forest (RF) (i.e., POD-GPR-DTR-RF model) is utilized for the prediction of eigenmodes and mean wind pressures. Wind pressure records from a wind tunnel experiment of a 600-m-high building are employed to verify the accuracy and effectiveness of the presented approach. The results show that the combined ML model (i.e., POD-GPR-DTR-RF model) developed based on the proposed approach performs satisfactorily in the prediction of WPTS and outperforms the conventional method that combines POD with backpropagation neural network model (i.e., POD-BPNN model), demonstrating that the proposed approach is an effective tool for prediction of WPTS on supertall buildings. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.