Numerically Investigating the Effect of Wind Load on Square and Setback Building

Abstract

Tall buildings have the major advantage of saving wide space by assimilating the settlements vertically which otherwise would have been spread over a large area. But with increasing heights of the buildings, the severity of wind loads also increases which may cause damage to the building as well as cause discomfort to the occupants. Hence, to reduce these effects, aerodynamic modifications are introduced in the buildings. This paper aims to present the effect of aerodynamic modification introduced in a basic square building in the form of setback. The numerical study was performed in ANSYS software based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) technique. Two models were compared in this study: a basic square model and a single-sided setback model with setback of 10% of lateral dimension provided at mid height. The variation of mean wind pressure coefficients along the face centerlines has been compared for both the square and setback buildings. Wind incidence angle (WIA) was varied from 0° to 90° at every 30° interval. It is observed that setback model registered the maximum increment in suction of 5.28% over the square model for the height where setback has been provided at the wind incidence angle of 90°. The values of pressure coefficients were found to be close to zero for two different faces at the wind incidence angles of 30° and 60°, respectively, for both the buildings.