A COMPARISON BETWEEN CODE AND EXPERIMENTALLY DETERMINED WIND PRESSURE COEFFICIENTS USING WIND TUNNEL TEST

Abstract

In recent years we have seen an exponential increase in the construction of highrise buildings due to the advent of new materials, modern construction technologies which have paved way for the construction of new type of systems that tend to be more flexible and slenderer, making them more prone to wind loadings. The building codes have given an adequate set of guidelines which tend to be more conservative and are made for the most simplistic cases. However, these guidelines fail to cater for special cases where the building tends to be irregular, thus giving more conservative design values and making the overall design more expensive in an environment where inflation has peaked. Keeping in view with the shortcoming of the building code, and the numerical simulations, this research aims to experimentally determine the actual wind pressure coefficients that act on the façade of the building using the wind tunnel test which are less time consuming and can be done for a variety of situations. This novel research has highlighted the need for carrying out the wind tunnel testing of high-rise buildings due to the increase in the construction of high-rise irregular shaped buildings in Pakistan. For this purpose, Gulberg Greens, Islamabad was selected as the prime location where a series of highrise buildings are being constructed. The wind profile for this location was analyzed and the wind profile was simulated using firstly the empirical equations as provided in the literature, which was later validated using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. The simulations were also later on confirmed for wind profiles using a handheld anemometer. This project involves the construction of a scaled down building model which was later equipped with ARDUINO UNO-Nano based pressure sensors to determine the static pressures which was correspondingly used to determine the pressure coefficients. The results of the research were very promising where we found that the pressure coefficient acting on the building were 0.705, 0.766 and 0.791 which are Lower than the one used in the design of the building by empirical means.