Database-Assisted Design of Low-Rise Buildings: Aerodynamic Considerations for a Practical Interpolation Scheme

Database-assisted design (DAD) is becoming a realistic possibility whereby archived wind pressure time series on building envelopes from wind tunnel experiments are directly used in structural analysis software for building design. In order for DAD to be of practical use, a data handling system is required. The main task of the system is to perform interpolation in order to obtain wind pressure time series beyond the basic configurations available in the database. The functional dependence of the pressure coefficients is reduced to geometric variables only, greatly simplifying the process of interpolation. It is shown that all interpolation schemes require estimation of the first and second order statistical moments.