Wind Engineering: A Review of the Eurocode provisions for the Wind Loading on Low-rise Buildings
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Date
2012-09
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Cranfield University
Abstract
Building codes such as the Eurocode have usually been used as a cheaper alternative to wind tunnel studies in the consideration of wind loading on a structure. It is often the case that very tall buildings and large structures have enough economic justification for expensive wind tunnel studies in their design stage. Such wind tunnel studies, as per state-of-the-art, feature simultaneous scanning of and acquisition of loading data from hundreds of pressure tappings with subsequent high-speed computer data processing and analysis. This is not the case for low-rise buildings which do not find their way into the wind tunnel except in the case where they are unusual edifices. Low-rise buildings, however, are the most damaged in wind storms. In addition, in the present times, their shapes are increasingly losing touch with the traditional and generic forms dealt with in the Eurocode. Therefore, the question is: How well does the Eurocode, which was put together with information from wind tunnel studies performed in the 50s and 70s using currently outdated data acquisition techniques, deal with present building shapes? The study was based on models of a simple cuboidal building; a quasi-rectangular building with inset faces in its plan; and a building plan featuring a re-entrant corner possessing curved surfaces at the internal and external junctions of its wings. It was concluded from the results of the study that adapting the Eurocode wind loading provisions to irregular building plans characteristic of modern times gives very unsafe solutions. The variations of pressure with wind direction on the internal walls of the wings of and the curved surface at the internal junction of the re-entrant corner were observed to follow coherent wave forms which are mutually similar. These call for further research.