This project is an investigation of the wind environment around a particular layout of buildings, as specified by members of the APEC-Wind Workshops in the Asia-Pacific Region. The building arrangement has been chosen as it is very typical of building arrangements used in practice, and it is such that some areas are expected to be uite windy when the wind is from certain directions. The Aerodynamics Laboratory undertakes many wind tunnel investigations of the wind environment to help city planners and architects find and solve any wind problems in public areas ahead of time. In Auckland, many such tests are undertaken as part of the Resource Consent process.
The laboratory has several different ways of measuring the ground level wind environment. It is the objective of this investigation to use three methods to compare the wind environment, as they should all come up with the same comfort criteria. These methods are: Irwin probes (axi-symmetric pressure probes), hot-wire anemometers (small sensitive sensors that can easily measure the time history of gusty wind), and erosion (particles of material are eroded away from windy areas when the wind speed it high enough to cause them to move.
The results will be compared with published data on the pedestrian wind environment around these particular buildings.
Undergraduate
Students will become familiar with wind tunnel testing, wind turbulence, careful experimental measurements, human comfort criteria, effect of buildings on the wind, effect of wind climate on street environments, writing programs in Matlab, analysis of data, reading the relevant literature, writing up results in a concise report.
None
Aerodynamics Lab (Newmarket 901 Lvl5, Lab)