Turbulence Effect on Mutual Interference of Tall Buildings

Abstract

Extensive wind‐tunnel tests are performed to investigate the mutual interference between neighboring tall square buildings with different sizes and breadths in a highly turbulent shear layer over an urban area. The effect of turbulence on the interference excitation is also examined, and it is compared to other results under a relatively low turbulence flow. Neither the along‐wind nor the cross‐wind response of the object building is significantly altered by the presence of an upstream building of any size within the highly turbulent flow except when an interfering slender building is located in the immediate upstream of the object building. The relative changes in responses with and without interference, i.e., the buffeting factors in each direction, decrease exponentially with the increase in turbulence, and reduce to around 1 when the turbulence intensities are increased up to 17–18%. That is, the dynamic responses in the downstream building are independent of the mutual interference effect and nearly equal to those in the isolated building.