Sensitivity Investigation on the Pressure Coefficients Non-Dimensionalization

The scaling of large structures to investigate their aerodynamics in wind tunnels is a common and robust procedure to estimate important magnitudes, including pressure coefficients. Different aspects can affect the estimation of pressure coefficients; four examples are the non-dimensionalization, bl...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Fabio Rizzo
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021-04-01
Series:Infrastructures
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2412-3811/6/4/53
Description
Summary:The scaling of large structures to investigate their aerodynamics in wind tunnels is a common and robust procedure to estimate important magnitudes, including pressure coefficients. Different aspects can affect the estimation of pressure coefficients; four examples are the non-dimensionalization, blockage, non-stationarity, and non-Gaussianity of the wind tunnel velocity. This paper shows the variability of pressure coefficients due to these four aspects for the case study of a closed box section of a suspended bridge. It was estimated that the pressure coefficients of similar pressure taps vary significantly due to different sets of wind velocity time history used to non-dimensionalize the wind tunnel pressures. In addition, the stationarity of the wind velocity process was not confirmed for all wind velocity sets and the non-Gaussianity of the wind velocity time history was confirmed.
ISSN:2412-3811