Wind-Pressure Coefficients on Low-Rise Building Enclosures Using Modern Wind-Tunnel Data and Voronoi Diagrams
Publication: ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part A: Civil Engineering
Volume 3, Issue 4
Abstract
External pressure coefficients specified in the ASCE 7-10 Standard, used to determine design wind pressures for the components and cladding of buildings, are developed from wind tunnel test data that date back 30–50 years. In recent decades, advances in pressure measurement and computer technology have made it possible to obtain simultaneous pressure records, with high sampling rates, at many more wind tunnel pressure taps than was the case in the past. This paper proposes a method to calculate external pressure coefficients using aerodynamic wind tunnel databases such as Tokyo Polytechnic University’s large, publicly available database. Voronoi diagrams are used to assign tributary areas to irregularly spaced pressure taps. User-defined grids of various sizes and shapes are placed at various offsets over the building surface to perform area-averaging of the pressure time series. Considering all wind directions for which measurements are obtained in the wind tunnel, the peak pressures are determined assuming a Gumbel distribution, and are extrapolated to a standard storm duration. The external peak pressure coefficients are then plotted as functions of their corresponding area for various zones of the building enclosure to produce plots similar to the ASCE 7-10 specifications on components and cladding. Results for three gable buildings analyzed in the paper show that the current ASCE 7-10 specifications can severely underestimate the external pressure coefficients for components and cladding of low-rise buildings.
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Acknowledgments
The first author was supported by the National Science Foundation’s Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation Bridge to the Doctorate (LSAMP-BD) Fellowship. The NIST-University of Maryland (UMD) collaboration was initiated by Dr. Emil Simiu of NIST and Prof. Bilal Ayyub of UMD. Additionally, Dr. Marc Levitan and Dr. Emil Simiu provided helpful comments and reviews.
Disclaimer
1.
The policy of the National Institute of Standards and Technology is to use the International System of Units (SI) in its technical communications. In this paper, however, building codes and standards are referenced in both customary (as is the practice in U.S. construction industry) and SI units.
2.
Some commercial products are identified in this paper for traceability of results. Such identification does not imply recommendation or endorsement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, nor does it imply that the products identified are necessarily the best available for the purpose.
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Published In
ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part A: Civil Engineering
Volume 3 • Issue 4 • December 2017
Copyright
©2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jul 1, 2016
Accepted: Mar 7, 2017
Published online: May 31, 2017
Discussion open until: Oct 31, 2017
Published in print: Dec 1, 2017
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