Along-Wind Dynamic Interference Effects of Tall Buildings

Abstract

Most previous investigations have focused on the wind induced interference effects between two buildings. The interference effects of three or more buildings have seldom been studied so far due to the huge workload of experiments and data processing. In this paper, the along-wind dynamic interference effects of two and three tall buildings are investigated through a series of wind tunnel tests on typical tall building models using the high frequency force balance technique. The testing cases are totally over 8000. In order to conveniently and rapidly process the huge amount of testing data, a Windows-based software platform integrating artificial neural network, statistics and spectral computations is developed. Database technique is also employed in the platform to manage the experimental results. Because of a vast amount of experimental results, this paper presents only detailed results of the along-wind dynamic interference effects but not the across-wind effects. Some selected results of the twin-building configuration from the present tests are compared with the previous comparable results in literature. Effects of upstream terrain, height ratio and breadth ratio of the tested models on the interference factor are discussed in detail.