An investigation of building/wind interaction

The interaction between buildings and their external environment is ultimately reflected on human comfort. A locally-built wind tunnel was designed, tested and utilized with different measuring facilities to obtain the pressure contours on the surfaces of the model at different wind speeds and directions. A smoke tunnel visualization technique was used to illustrate the separation, reattachment and wake spread around the building models. ANSYS FLOTRAN CFD computer package which utilizes the finite element approach, was also used to analyze the flow around building models as velocity and pressure contours. Comparison between results obtained showed good agreement. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.