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

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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.