Wind Information Now More Precise Than Ever
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| With the race on to build increasingly taller buildings and longer bridges, focusing on the effects of wind loads has become even more important. Building size, however, is just one factor that has contributed to the increasing importance of wind engineering, a relatively new discipline that focuses on the effects of wind on structures.
Simon Pugh, head of process engineering technology for IHS ESDU International, points to the actual design of the buildings as a factor, and says that the increasingly lighter, more flexible and more complex structures that architects are designing also have a considerable impact on wind considerations.
One reason for this is due to the effect wind has on a structure. While most buildings are designed to be flexible so that they can sway with the wind rather than potentially being toppled by it, too much movement can be disturbing to building occupants. Architects can counter this effect by installing systems to minimize swaying. However, as buildings become taller, lighter and more flexible, movement can become even more of an issue. That’s why it’s so important to be able to reliably predict the effects of wind load on structures.
Since 1970, IHS ESDU has been publishing its Wind Engineering Series, which has been designed to provide reliable methods and data for predicting the wind loads on buildings and their response to those loads.
“Wind engineering is the study of the nature of wind itself,” says Pugh. “And the Wind Engineering Series is a way of assessing what the nature of that wind will be and using that information to calculate the pressures created by that wind.”
With this data, he says, engineers can accurately calculate what the movement of a building will be, based on the wind the building will be subject to.
The Wind Engineering Series lays out the steps engineers must follow in order to calculate these movements. The first requires the engineer to estimate wind speeds and turbulence properties for the terrain, including the topographic effects on wind speed.
Of course, since wind can vary from location to location, it is difficult, if not impossible; to include such localized information into a single tool. That’s why the Wind Engineering Series depends on data provided by local meteorological services. “We show how to take that information into account and use that to create the calculations,” says Pugh.
He says the next step, after characterizing the local wind environment, is to follow prediction procedures to estimate force and pressure coefficients for different types of structures, such as stacks and chimneys, offshore structures, masts, towers, lattice structures, beams, plates, boundary walls, aerials and regular building shapes.
“From these forces and pressures, the engineer can estimate both the mean loading and the dynamic, fluctuating loading due to the turbulence in the wind. Dynamic effects are associated with oscillation of structures induced by wind effects (such as buffeting by turbulence, vortex shedding and galloping) close to one or more of the structure’s natural frequencies of vibration, which also can be calculated,” says Pugh.
A subscription service, the Wind Engineering Series is being continually updated by IHS ESDU, which uses data collected from research institutes and journals to keep the Series current. “We take that data and make sense of it,” Pugh says. |