Non-stationary modeling and simulation of strong winds

Abstract

Wind velocity is usually assumed to obey a stationary stochastic process in wind engineering, and this may cause significant bias in describing extremely severe strong wind such as typhoons and thunderstorms. To take into account the non-stationary characteristics of extreme wind, a novel evolutionary power spectral density (EPSD) model is proposed, and the spectral representation method (SRM) is introduced to simulate the whole process of strong winds. Firstly, the wavelet transform (WT) method is adopted to capture the three-dimensional time-varying properties of the low-frequency mean winds, and the associated turbulence features, including turbulent intensity, gust factor, probability density function, and power spectrum, are analyzed in depth. Secondly, the measured horizontal EPSD of strong winds are estimated. Thirdly, the performance of the proposed EPSD model is validated. Finally, the whole process of non-stationary strong winds are simulated and discussed. The results show that the proposed EPSD models are in good agreement with the measured EPSD, and the time-frequency features of the power spectrum of the simulated winds are well reproduced, which provides a powerful tool for large eddy simulation and wind engineering studies under non-stationary extreme wind climate.

Keywords

• Non-stationarity
• Evolutionary power spectral density
• Strong wind
• Wavelet transform
• Spectral representation method