Hybrid CFD-Wind Tunnel Platform for Wind Load Evaluation of Tall Buildings

当涉及到高层建筑的风荷载评估时，设计规范有其局限性。例如，规范(I)只考虑基本的建筑物形状，(Ii)不能考虑可能具有重大影响的局部周围配置，以及(Iii)没有区分天气(常规)和非天气(雷暴)风。在这些情况下可以使用风洞(WT)和计算流体动力学(CFD)工具。WT已经经历了五十多年的验证和使用的漫长旅程。然而，进行WT研究需要很长的前期准备时间(几周)来构建模型和进行仪器测试。CFD可以克服这一挑战，特别是当并行计算能力得到适当利用的时候。然而，由于CFD对风荷载评估的引入相对较新，还需要更多的验证。将CFD和WT工具结合起来，结合两者在稳健性和准确性方面的优点，研究高层建筑的空气动力学问题。在本研究方案中，引入了三个研究项目来研究考虑横向风和非天气风(雷暴)的高层建筑的风荷载评估：(I)在共享内存的多处理器(SMMP)系统上开发和验证高性能(HP)CFD程序，用于气动风荷载评估。SMMP系统被证明比目前CFD程序中广泛使用的基于消息传递接口(MPI)的系统快3-4倍；(Ii)开发、校准和自动化瑞尔森大学亚音速WT的WT测试平台，该平台将用于验证计划I中的CFD程序；(Iii)开发和验证分析平台，以将CFD/WT的空气动力学数据与气候和结构动力分析相结合，以预测建筑物响应和等效静态荷载。预期的CFD/WT平台将被用来分析几种建筑形状和周围配置，以弥补上述设计规范中的空白，并开发一种适用于执业工程师和/或设计规范中采用的简化分析风荷载评估方法。此外，该平台使学术界和工业界的用户能够通过网络接口免费使用该平台，以获得他们的建筑荷载。这最终将使我们的社会受益，使建筑物对经常由气候变化驱动的与自然风有关的灾害具有更强的适应能力，这是加拿大政府的两个优先研究领域。

Design codes have limitations when it comes to wind load evaluation for tall buildings. For example, the codes (i) consider only basic building shapes, (ii) can't account for local surrounding configuration which can be of a significant effect, and (iii) do not distinguish between synoptic (regular) and non-synoptic (thunderstorm) winds. Wind Tunnel (WT) and Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) tools can be used in those cases. WT has gone through a long journey of over five decades of validation and utilization. However, conducting a WT study requires a long lead time (several weeks) for the model construction and instrumentation. CFD can overcome this challenge especially when the parallel computational power is properly utilized. However, because of its relatively newer introduction to wind load evaluation, CFD still needs more validation. This proposal focuses on coupling CFD and WT tools to combine the merits of both in terms of robustness and accuracy to study tall buildings aerodynamics. In this research proposal, three research programs have been introduced to investigate wind load evaluation of tall buildings considering snoptic and non-synoptic (thunderstorm) winds as follows: (i) Develop and validate a High-Performance (HP) CFD code tailored for aerodynamic wind load evaluation on Shared Memory Multi-Processor (SMMP) systems. SMMP systems prove to be 3-4 times faster than systems based on Message Passing Interface (MPI) widely used in current CFD codes; (ii) Develop, calibrate and automate a platform for WT testing at the subsonic WT at Ryerson U, which will be utilized to validate the CFD code in Program i; (iii) Develop and validate an analysis platform to couple the aerodynamic data from CFD/WT with climate and structural dynamic analyses to predict building responses and equivalent static loads. The anticipated CFD/WT platform will be employed to analyze several building shapes and surrounding configurations to cover the gaps in the design codes mentioned above and to develop a simplified analytical wind load evaluation approach suitable for practitioner engineers and/or for adoption in design codes. In addition, the platform enables users from both academia and industry to use the platform through a cyber interface at no cost to obtain their building loads. This will ultimately benefit our society to have buildings more resilient to natural wind-related disasters frequently driven by the climate change, which are two of the priority research areas of the Canadian Government.