Computational evaluation of wind loads on a standard tall building using LES

Abstract

In this paper, wind induced aerodynamic loads on a standard tall building have been evaluated through large-eddy simulation (LES) technique. The flow parameters of an open terrain were recorded from the downstream of an empty boundary layer wind tunnel (BLWT) and used to prescribe the transient inlet boundary of the LES simulations. Three different numerically generated inflow boundary conditions have been investigated to assess their suitability for LES. A high frequency pressure integration (HFPI) approach has been employed to obtain the wind load. A total of 280 pressure monitoring points have been systematically distributed on the surfaces of the LES model building. Similar BLWT experiments were also done to validate the numerical results. In addition, the effects of adjacent buildings were studied. Among the three wind field generation methods (synthetic, Simirnov's, and Lund's recycling method), LES with perturbation from the synthetic random flow approach showed better agreement with the BLWT data. In general, LES predicted peak wind loads comparable with the BLWT data, with a maximum difference of 15% and an average difference of 5%, for an isolated building case and however higher estimation errors were observed for cases where adjacent buildings were placed in the vicinity of the study building.