Numerical simulation of buffeting longitudinal wind forces on buildings

Abstract

A developed numerical simulation technique for buffeting longitudinal wind forces on rectangular buildings is presented in this paper. This technique mainly aims to generate time histories with prescribed probabilistic characteristics for the longitudinal wind load turbulent component which is considered as a zero mean stationary multivariate one-dimensional stochastic process, then the instantaneous wind load time histories are obtained by adding each mean wind load component to the corresponding generated time history of the turbulent component. A simplified procedure, which takes the advantage of aerodynamic admittance function, is proposed to estimate the longitudinal wind load on buildings in the frequency domain. A very efficient simulation algorithm based on spectral representation method which depends on superposition of trigonometric functions with random phase angles is used to perform the transformation from the frequency domain to the time domain. A MATLAB function is coded to implement the proposed simulation technique. By testing the proposed technique statistically, it has been noted that there are good agreements between the temporal and target auto/cross-correlation functions of the simulated wind forces, and by testing it structurally, the generated instantaneous wind load time histories show a good ability in giving a reasonable dynamic response for the studied building.