Sensitivity Investigation on the Pressure Coefficients Non-Dimensionalization

Abstract

The scaling of large structures to investigate their aerodynamics in wind tunnels is a common and robust procedure to estimate important magnitudes, including pressure coefficients. Different aspects can affect the estimation of pressure coefficients; four examples are the non-dimensionalization, blockage, non-stationarity, and non-Gaussianity of the wind tunnel velocity. This paper shows the variability of pressure coefficients due to these four aspects for the case study of a closed box section of a suspended bridge. It was estimated that the pressure coefficients of similar pressure taps vary significantly due to different sets of wind velocity time history used to non-dimensionalize the wind tunnel pressures. In addition, the stationarity of the wind velocity process was not confirmed for all wind velocity sets and the non-Gaussianity of the wind velocity time history was confirmed.

Unsteady Numerical Simulation of Two-Dimensional Airflow over a Square Cross-Section at High Reynolds Numbers as a Reduced Model of Wind Actions on Buildings

“…Petrini and Ciampoli (2012) proposed employing performance-based designs of tall buildings against wind, in a similar manner as for seismic designs [10]. With the advancement of computational tools, extensive efforts to address wind designs by means of advanced numerical analyses have been published in recent years [11][12][13][14]. Moreover, wind pressure distributions have also been proposed for various types of structures other than buildings, such as wind turbines [15] and solar collectors [16].…”

“…Buildings 2024, 14, x FOR PEER REVIEW 2 of 18 computational tools, extensive efforts to address wind designs by means of advanced numerical analyses have been published in recent years [11][12][13][14]. Moreover, wind pressure distributions have also been proposed for various types of structures other than buildings, such as wind turbines [15] and solar collectors [16].…”