Experimental and Numerical Studies on Effects of Wind Pressure on “C” Shape of Buildings with Varying aspect ratio

Abstract

Designs of buildings are changing with emerging demands of various aesthetical features and efficient design based on geometry. Development of new building materials and construction techniques have been enabled us to build new buildings which are tall and unsymmetrical but unfortunately such structures are more susceptible to wind loads. Thus it becomes necessary to estimate wind loads with higher degree of confidence. Although ample information regarding wind load on symmetrical and regular structure is available in various international codes, but they lack the study of effect of wind forces on unsymmetrical structures. This paper presents experimental and numerical studies of wind effect on commonly used C-shape buildings with varying aspect ratio and its optimisation caused by the alteration of angle of incidence. Further, results obtained by numerical analysis has been validated with experimental one. For this study, numerical analysis has been carried out using ANSYS FLUENT with k-ε turbulence model and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques is used to evaluate the pressure on different faces of the model for incidence angle of 0degree to 180degree at the interval of 30degree and wind tunnel experiments has been done for the experimental analysis. The results found by CFD technique are well compared with the experimental results which suggests the feasibility of using this technique of predicting wind pressures on building efficiently and accurately.