Wind Pressure Coefficients for Different Building Configurations with and without an Adjacent Building

Abstract

The design protocol for wind-driven cross ventilation in buildings should include two processes, namely the determination of required ventilation rate to reduce the room temperature and the prediction of the ventilation rate resulting from the arrangement of openings and wind pressure on those. Computer fluid dynamic techniques (CFD) have the potential to be a useful tool in such calculations but another more practical way is the airflow network model combined with the wind pressure coefficient (Cp) values for buildings with different shapes and surrounding conditions. The authors have conducted a series of wind tunnel experiments using scale building models to obtain the wind pressure coefficient distribution on the building envelope and have developed a database to be used as input data for network simulation programs. In the estimation of Cp, one of the challenging problems is the effect of surrounding obstacles such as adjacent buildings. There are some works that take this effect into consideration, by making corrections to the wind pressure coefficients of an isolated building. Firstly, this paper applies such correction knowledge and secondly, tries to draw some general rules, which can be applied when estimating the wind pressure coefficients for a building which is surrounded by adjacent buildings.