• Wind and Structures
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.17-41
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• 2016

To address the uncertainty of the flight trajectories caused by the turbulence and gustiness of the wind field over the roof and in the wake of a building, a 3-D probabilistic trajectory model of flat-type wind-borne debris is developed in this study. The core of this methodology is a 6 degree-of-freedom deterministic model, derived from the governing equations of motion of the debris, and a Monte Carlo simulation engine used to account for the uncertainty resulting from vertical and lateral gust wind velocity components. The influence of several parameters, including initial wind speed, time step, gust sampling frequency, number of Monte Carlo simulations, and the extreme gust factor, on the accuracy of the proposed model is examined. For the purpose of validation and calibration, the simulated results from the 3-D probabilistic trajectory model are compared against the available wind tunnel test data. Results show that the maximum relative error between the simulated and wind tunnel test results of the average longitudinal position is about 20%, implying that the probabilistic model provides a reliable and effective means to predict the 3-D flight of the plate-type wind-borne debris.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.834-845
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• 1995

An experimental study is made in a nearly two-dimensional 90.deg. curved duct to investigate the effects of interaction between streamline curvature and mean strain on turbulence. The initial shear at the entrance to the curved duct is varied by an upstream shear generator to produce five different shear conditions ; a uniform flow (UF), a positive weak shear (PW), a positive strong shear(PS), a negative weak shear (NW) and a negative strong shear(NS). With the mean field data of the case UF, variations of the momentum thickness, the shape factor and the skin friction over the convex(inner) surface and the concave (outer) surface are scrutinized quantitatively in-depth. It is found that, while the pressure loss due to curvature is insensitive to the inlet shear rates, the distributions of wall static pressure along both convex and concave surfaces are much influenced by the inlet shear rates.