INFLUENCE OF TOPOGRAPHY ON WIND PRESSURES IN TANKS USING CFD

The influence of topography on wind pressures acting on structures has been of interest to the civil engineering community for some time; how- ever, because of the complexity of the problem, only few cases have been solved. The evaluation of pres- sures in tanks located in hills is one of those complex problems and has not been addressed in the litera- ture. This paper presents a computational fluid dy- namics simulation of the problem, in which the do- main including the hill and the tank is discretized us- ing finite elements. The results show that the actual location of the tank with respect to a hill has a signif- icant influence on the pressures, so that tanks locat- ed at the top of a hill undergo severe increases in pressure coefficients and also changes in pressure distributions around the tank.

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