VOLUME-FRACTION TECHNIQUES - POWERFUL TOOLS FOR WIND ENGINEERING

In this presentation we summarize the foundation and practical details of fractional-volume modeling methods. In particular, we shall demonstrate that these methods offer powerful computational approaches to a variety of physical phenomena in wind engineering. Use of volume-fraction methods is efficient because they typically require much less computer memory and less computational time than other techniques for modeling geometries. To be effective, however, these methods need to be supplemented with special considerations for boundary conditions and for numerical stability. A variety of examples will be used to demonstrate how fractional area/volume methods work.