Application of Proper Orthogonal Decomposition Technique in Wind Engineering of Structures

Abstract

Dynamic wind pressures acting on structures are complicated functions of both time and space. The proper orthogonal decomposition technique (POD) is a method of detecting a new coordinate system which can most efficiently represent such random wind pressure fields to identify hidden deterministic structures. In this paper, the POD technique is applied to dynamic wind pressures on spatial structures in order to investigate the properties of these pressures and enable to understand the phenomena better. The results indicate that the POD technique can greatly reduce the amount of data that needs to be stored to re-examine the random wind pressure, which can be reconstructed by only a few dominant modes. It requires 5 modes with an accumulative proportion of 70~80% approximately. Moreover, the dominant modes can describe the spatial distributions of the fluctuating wind load effectively.