DYNAMIC RESPONSE OF WIND-EXCITED BUILDING USING CFD

Abstract

Computational wind engineering as a new branch of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been developed recently to evaluate the interaction between wind and buildings numerically. In the present study, a systematic examination of wind effects on tall buildings and flow condition around buildings has been carried out using commercially available CFD software FLUENT 5. Both renormalization group (RNG) k–ε method and large eddy simulation (LES) with the Smagorinsky model are adopted as turbulence models and the results are compared with the wind-tunnel measurements. The weighted amplitude wave superposition (WAWS) method is used to generate atmospheric wind turbulence. The RNG k–ε method can predict the vortex shedding phenomenon well when compared with experiments for uniform flow input, but fails to predict the shedding frequency accurately for fluctuating incoming flow. On the other hand, the LES model shows reasonably good agreement with experiment in predicting vortex-shedding phenomenon for both uniform and fluctuating flows at inlet. Random-vibration based theory is employed for estimating r.m.s. response of tall buildings and the results compared well with the experimental results for a square building.