THE DISTRIBUTION OF PRESSURE NEAR ROOF CORNERS OF FLAT ROOF LOW BUILDINGS

An experimental study on low building roof pressures was carried out with a series of models of varying height and plan size in two different flows in the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory (BLWTL) at the University of Western Ontario (UWO). Some of the results are presented in this paper. Comparison with the Texas Tech University (TTU) full-scale results for the critical corner region shows that better agreement has been achieved than those seen in previous publications. This is attributed to the use of a larger model and improved flow simulation in this study; however, certain discrepancies still remain for the peak and rms pressure coefficient (C-p) in this corner region. The possible reasons are discussed. Arguing that the characteristic length for normalizing the roof coordinates, x and y, should be the height, H, the pressure distribution, C-p(x/H, y/H), over the corner area is studied in detail. Under similar approaching flow conditions, C-p(x/H, y/H) collapses for models with different dimensions. An effort has been made to obtain unified descriptions of the experimental data that provide a suitable form for codes. Area-averaging effects are also examined.