Experimental and zonal modeling for wind pressures on double-skin facades of a tall building

Abstract This paper investigates wind pressure characteristics on a corridor double-skin facade (DSF) of a tall rectangular building through experimental and numerical modeling. Firstly, wind-tunnel experiments have been carried out to study the wind pressures acting on three surfaces of the corridor DSF of the building: the outside and inside surfaces of the external skin and the outside surface of the internal skin. The characteristics of the wind pressure distribution on the DSF are investigated for different DSF layouts, air corridor width and incident wind angles. The mean and standard deviation of the pressure coefficients are presented for twelve wind angles over 360°. The experimental data show complex wind pressure distributions inside and outside the air cavity. Then, the zonal approach is applied to model the inner-gap pressures on the DSF. The results from the zonal modeling compare relatively well with the wind-tunnel measurements. Thus, the zonal approach is an effective tool for evaluating the performance of DSF on tall buildings and may be an efficient alternative to the traditional wind-tunnel test and computational fluid dynamic (CFD) method.