An Algorithm for Estimation of Wind-Building Interaction in the Early Design Stage

Abstract

Wind-building interaction can be estimated with one of three approaches, or a combination of these: (1) on-site measurements, (2) reduced-scale wind tunnel measurements or (3) numerical simulation based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). It's clear that for early design stage, existing fore mentioned methods are very time consuming and they require detailed study in terms of of fluid dynamics. These methods are not efficient especially in the case that the building form changes dynamically. Besides, both wind tunnel analysis and CFD simulations are not efficient when it comes to take output data in real-time. Due to all of these reasons, a need for a fast and robust method occurs. At this point, a very powerful method which doesn't require solid geometry as an input, besides in which there's no need to use mesh (control volume) is developed. In this study, the details of the developed algorithm and the output of it are given. In addition, the principal building forms are also simulated by the algorithm and the results are validated by the Ansys Fluent software. As a result, it is seen that the developed algorithm can be a guide in wind-building interaction analysis for architects in the preliminary design stage.

Keywords

• building aerodynamics
• computational fluid dynamics; wind efficient design; wind-building interaction.