Influences of equilibrium atmosphere boundary layer and turbulence parameter on wind loads of low-rise buildings

In this paper, the influences of two important problems in computational wind engineering (CWE), which are the modeling of equilibrium atmosphere boundary layer (ABL) and the specification of turbulence model parameters, on the numerical simulations of wind pressure distributions on a typical low-rise building are investigated sequentially through detailed comparisons between the numerical results and the wind tunnel test data. The capability of the proposed inflow turbulence boundary conditions in constructing equilibrium ABL is verified, and the effect of the turbulence parameters on the numerical results is illustrated. The combination of the carefully considered inflow boundary conditions, and the turbulence parameters can improve the numerical simulation accuracy of the wind pressures of the low-rise building. The present work seems to be helpful to further realize the importance of these two problems as well as to provide a referential study to the accuracy improvement of CWE.