Numerical Simulation of Wind Pressures on a High-rise Building by Auto-mesh System

Abstract

This paper describes large eddy simulation of wind pressures on a square cylinder in a uniform flow and a high-rise building immersed in an atmospheric turbulent boundary layer. For the atmospheric boundary layer case, the inflow turbulence is generated by a numerical wind tunnel. In the numerical simulation, particular attention is devoted to the performance of an auto hexahedral non-structural mesh. Both simulations are performed for three grid systems: an auto hexahedral non-structured grid, a structured Cartesian grid and a non-structured triangular prism grid, and for three grid numbers. The present study shows that the auto hexahedral unstructured mesh achieves the best simulation results for wind pressures on the square cylinder and the high-rise building. When the grid number is sufficiently large, the differences among the results obtained from the three investigated grid systems are not significant. However, the advantage of the auto hexahedral unstructured mesh becomes clear when the grid number decreases, because it enables a balanced distribution of orthogonal grids. The results described in this paper demonstrate that the auto hexahedral non-structured mesh has good potential applicability to simulation of urban flows.