Open AccessWind-Pressure Coefficients on Low-Rise Building Enclosures Using Modern Wind-Tunnel Data and Voronoi Diagrams
Author(s) -
Matthew L. Gierson,
Brian M. Phillips,
Dat Duthinh,
Bilal M. Ayyub
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
asce-asme journal of risk and uncertainty in engineering systems. part a. civil engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.598
H-Index - 146
ISSN - 2376-7642
DOI - 10.1061/ajrua6.0000915
Subject(s) - wind tunnel , pressure measurement , aerodynamics , low rise , cladding (metalworking) , wind direction , wind engineering , wind speed , engineering , pressure coefficient , meteorology , structural engineering , marine engineering , geography , mechanical engineering , aerospace engineering , materials science , metallurgy
External pressure coefficients specified in the ASCE 7-10 Standard, used to determine design wind pressures for the components and cladding of buildings, are developed from wind tunnel test data that date back 30-50 years. In recent decades, advances in pressure measurement and computer technology have made it possible to obtain simultaneous pressure records, with high sampling rates, at many more wind tunnel pressure taps than was the case in the past. This paper proposes a method to calculate external pressure coefficients using aerodynamic wind tunnel databases such as Tokyo Polytechnic University's large, publicly available database. Voronoi diagrams are used to assign tributary areas to irregularly spaced pressure taps. User-defined grids of various sizes and shapes are placed at various offsets over the building surface to perform area-averaging of the pressure time series. Considering all wind directions for which measurements are obtained in the wind tunnel, the peak pressures are determined assuming a Gumbel distribution, and are extrapolated to a standard storm duration. The external peak pressure coefficients are then plotted as functions of their corresponding area for various zones of the building enclosure to produce plots similar to the ASCE 7-10 specifications on components and cladding. Results for three gable buildings analyzed in the paper show that the current ASCE 7-10 specifications can severely underestimate the external pressure coefficients for components and cladding of low-rise buildings.