Towards a standard CFD setup for wind load assessment of high-rise buildings: Part 2 – Blind test of chamfered and rounded corner high-rise buildings

Wind load assessment of the CAARC high-rise building performed with Large Eddy Simulation has recently shown to be applicable in Part 1 of the research, where deviations between experimental and digital results were in average 10–13% for the peak wind loads. Part 2 performs CFD blind tests of the CAARC building with chamfered and rounded corner modifications, to investigate how accurate CFD simulations are without prior knowledge of experimental wind tunnel results.

The high-rise buildings are examined for the surface pressure distribution, the peak predicted structural responses and the Floor-by-Floor loadings. The settings for the numerical simulations of Part 2 are similar to the tests of Part 1. The CFD simulations are performed as replicas of experimental wind tunnel tests, to secure directly comparable test setup and post-processing procedures.

The mean surface pressures on both high-rise buildings had high consistency with experimental results. Furthermore, the minimum and maximum peak surface pressure coefficients showed prominent good agreements. The chamfered high-rise building had average deviations of 14.92, 14.08 and 22.07% for the Mx, My and Mz base peak moments, where discrepancies of 12.56, 11.58 and 15.51% for Mx, My and Mz were found for the rounded corner high-rise building.