Field experiments for wind loads on a low-rise building with adjustable pitch

Abstract

A wind engineering research field laboratory, which consists of a full-scale low-rise building and two towers, has been constructed by Tongji University near Shanghai Pudong International Airport to study the characteristics of near-ground wind field and wind pressure on low-rise buildings. The full-scale building, whose roof pitch could be adjusted ranging from 0° to 30°, is 10 m in length, 6 m in width and 8 m in eave's height. It is employed to study the wind pressure on the gable roof of low-rise building with different roof pitches. This paper explicitly and concretely discusses the filed facility, data measurement system, data acquisition system, and tap location to provide references for related researchers. Besides, two pieces of time-histories of ten-minute-length wind pressures are analyzed at 0° and 20° roof pitches respectively to compare with those of a wind tunnel test on a rigid model of 1: 30 scale. The results show that the tendency for the mean and fluctuating wind pressure distributions between the two kinds of tests is nearly similar. © 2012 Peng Huang et al.