Dr. Ing. Mark Sterling

Grupo de Ingeniería del Viento de la Universidad de Birmingham, UK, Miembro del Comité Ejecutivo de la International Association of Wind Engineering.

-Presentación: Modelling transient winds.

Over the last decade or so, modelling the effects of non-stationary, transient winding loading on buildings has recently started to increase in interest. Recent literature has tended to favour examining thunderstorm downburst and these have been physically modelled by either employing an impinging jet or a slot-jet approach. It is however interesting to note that there is a dearth of full-scale data to enable calibration. Hence, not only are there a variety of scale issues but there is also a question of what actually constitutes a downburst from a wind loading perspective. With this in mind a number of researchers have tended to focus on examining certain aspects of non-stationary winds from which it is envisaged that generic information pertaining to this class of wind loading can be obtained. The full paper will examine a number of issues associated with physically simulating non stationary winds. In particular, the flow field arising from a non-stationary impinging jet and the corresponding pressure distribution around a simple cubic structure will be examined and compared to boundary layer wind data.