A Mesoscale CFD Simulation Study of Basic Wind Pressure in Complex Terrain—A Case Study of Taizhou City

Abstract

The basic wind pressure or the reference wind pressure for structural design varies greatly across complex terrain. Since only a few meteorological stations can provide adequate extreme wind speed records, it is very difficult to appropriately determine the basic wind pressure for a specific site without a long history of meteorological records. To solve this problem, a mesoscale CFD model was developed and optimized based on geographic information data for Taizhou and suitable turbulence models were selected for CFD simulation. The mean extreme wind speed and the corresponding direction at five main weather stations with long observation histories in Taizhou were used as the verification conditions to perform the CFD simulation of the extreme wind field. The maximum wind speeds of the rural areas, cities, and streets of Taizhou were obtained from the results of the mesoscale CFD simulations. Then, the 50-year return period reference wind pressures were calculated and could be used for the wind-resistant structural design of buildings for sites without a long history of meteorological records. The reliability of the results was verified by comparing the simulation results with the observation data at five main stations with a long history.