COMPARATIVE MEASUREMENTS OF WIND PRESSURE ON A MODEL OF THE FULL-SCALE EXPERIMENTAL HOUSE AT AYLESBURY, ENGLAND

The two-storey house at Aylesbury, England, built by the Building Research Establishment for the full-scale measurement of wind pressures, has been modelled at 1:500 scale in a boundary layer wind tunnel so that the reliability of simulation could be verified for low-rise buildings. Wind tunnel tests of building models of 5° and 22.5° roof slope are described. Surface pressure measurements are compared with full-scale data for various wall and roof locations. For the model terrain best modelling full-scale conditions, the results show agreement which is encouraging. In particular, for winds normal to a face, agreement between experiment and full-scale is asgood as between two similar full-scale runs obtained on different days. However, the results have been found to be sensitive to local roughness elements in the upstream terrain. This not only places bounds on the accuracy with which the experiments can be expected to reproduce full-scale, but also suggests that there are practical limitations to the accuracy with which pressure coefficients can be predetermined for design. Furthermore, since the apparent roughness length (z0) is obviously limited in its ability to characterize the local roughness near the measuring site, the traditionally used similarity parameter h z0 (height of building/roughness length) is probably not sufficient to ensure similarity when significant isolated local roughness elements are present. © 1979.