Numerical simulation of wind-induced mean and peak pressures around a low-rise structure

Published

August 1, 2020

Author(s)

DongHun Yeo, Robert H. Ong, Luca Patruno, Yaping He, Kenny C. Kwok

Abstract

We performed Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis of the low-rise buildings immersed in a turbulent boundary layer. The Silsoe 6 m cube was chosen as the main case study in representing the key features of the typical wind conditions experienced by low-rise buildings. The turbulent inflow condition is generated by employing a precursor technique. A sensitivity study is conducted to investigate the effects of eight subgrid-scale (SGS) models on the flow around the cube. The incoming turbulence intensity and mesh refinements for each of the SGS models are also explored. The results in terms of time-averaged pressure fields for relatively well-resolved simulations are well compliant with available experimental data and insensitive to the selection of SGS model. We demonstrate that while the effect of the aforementioned factors has a limited impact on the first-order statistics of the pressure coefficients, their influence becomes much more pronounced when analysing higher-order statistics (i.e. variance, skewness and kurtosis) and extreme values. The extent of their relative importance depends on the location of the point under investigation and the quantity of interest. The current study provides guidelines on the choice of factors which can strongly affect the results obtained employing CFD simulations when the local peak pressure field quantities are of interest, for example, in the case of cladding design.

Citation

Engineering Structures

Pub Type

Journals

Keywords

Silsoe cube, LES, High-order statistics, Extreme values

Citation

Yeo, D. , Ong, R. , Patruno, L. , He, Y. and Kwok, K. (2020), Numerical simulation of wind-induced mean and peak pressures around a low-rise structure, Engineering Structures (Accessed November 21, 2024)