BLWT tests and design loads on the roof of the new olympic stadium in Piraeus

The paper introduces some peculiar and innovative aspects by the experimental tests carried out in a boundary-layer wind tunnel (BLWT) for the design of the roof of the new Olympic soccer stadium in Piraeus, Greece, using simultaneous pressure measurements and state-of-the-art processing techniques. The wind tunnel data are then used for the numerical simulation of the quasi-static response of the structure in the time domain, so obtaining the time histories of the structural response. The extreme values of the wind effects are evaluated directly from the statistical analysis of the corresponding time histories and are compared with those from dead loads. Finally the uniform pressure distributions are identified which produce the same extreme values of wind effects.