Investigation of mean wind pressures on 'E' plan shaped tall building

Due to shortage of land and architectural aesthetics, sometimes the buildings are constructed as unconventional in plan. The wind force acts differently according to the plan shape of the building. So, it is of utter importance to study wind force or, more specifically wind pressure on an unconventional plan shaped tall building. To address this issue, this paper demonstrates a comprehensive study on mean pressure coefficient of 'E' plan shaped tall building. This study has been carried out experimentally and numerically by wind tunnel test and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation respectively. Mean wind pressures on all the faces of the building are predicted using wind tunnel test and CFD simulation varying wind incidence angles from 0 degrees to 180 degrees at an interval of 30 degrees. The accuracy of the numerically predicted results are measured by comparing results predicted by CFD with experimental results and it seems to have a good agreement with wind tunnel results. Besides wind pressures, wind flow patterns are also obtained by CFD for all the wind incidence angles. These flow patterns predict the behavior of pressure variation on the different faces of the building. For better comparison of the results, pressure contours on all the faces are also predicted by both the methods. Finally, polynomial expressions as the sine and cosine function of wind angle are proposed for obtaining mean wind pressure coefficient on all the faces using Fourier series expansion. The accuracy of the fitted expansions are measured by sum square error, R-2 value and root mean square error.