Area-average peak pressures in a gable roof vortex region

Abstract A current area of research interest is the ability of boundary-layer wind tunnels to accurately model wind pressures on small buildings. The difficulty in modeling occurs, in part, because of the need to model the atmospheric boundary layer at scales which make it difficult to incorporate the larger eddies into the wind-tunnel boundary layer. Another difficulty is a lack of high-quality field data. In this study, roof pressures measured on a small test building near Fort Collins, CO, USA, have been obtained with the explicit purpose of comparing to boundary-layer wind-tunnel tests. At a 1 : 25 model scale, the wind-tunnel boundary layer contained an excess of turbulent energy at small scales and a lack of turbulent energy at large scales. The model and field data showed good comparison for both point pressures and area-average pressures in a roof vortex region.