High-resolution pressure measurements on a high-rise building acquired at the Wall of Wind.

Wind tunnel testing represents an established technique for the assessment of wind-induced pressures on cladding systems. Nonetheless, some physical events, such as the strong negative pressure peaks that occur on a high-rise building’s lateral facades, are still not fully understood.

This repository presents high-resolution pressure measurements on a high-rise building model, focused on investigating the nature of these extreme suction events. The measurements were obtained at the NHERI Wall of Wind (WoW) Experimental Facility (EF) of Florida International University (FIU); the measurement set-up was designed to reproduce previous measurements performed in the closed-section wind tunnel of Politecnico di Milano (PoliMi). The model of the building is a rectangular box, representative of a 100m tall building. It was equipped with aluminum tiles containing closely-spaced pressure taps and tested at different wind directions. The locations of the taps were defined to support a detailed study of the pressure distribution next to corners and edges of the building, i.e. where the highest peaks are expected. Similar to the PoliMi experiment, pressure peaks with different characteristics were observed: some are extremely localized in space and time and thus unlikely to cause damage to the panels, others have larger spatial-temporal extent and should be accounted for when determining the design pressure.

To promote dissemination and use of the data as a benchmark test case for the investigation of wind loads on high-rise buildings, we provide the following data:
- Velocity measurements to characterize the atmospheric boundary layer
- Pressure measurements on the high-rise building model for different wind directions
- Documents on model shape and measurements locations
- Matlab functions to read and process velocity and pressure measurements, and relative documentation

The corresponding data for the PoliMi experiments are available from the Zenodo.org repository.