City Development and Cladding Design

As the city grows, the wind phenomenon becomes more complex, changing directions according to the obstructing element. This variation in wind flow is due to the interaction of fluid flow with the built environment (Holmes 2018). As a result, the change in the urban topology can either increase or decrease both the global wind loads on the building structure and the local peak pressures acting on the nonstructural components such as cladding elements. Several studies were performed on the effect of existing surrounding buildings on high-rise building loads. It started in the early seventies after the collapse of the three natural draft cooling towers at Ferrybridge, England in 1965 which was highly correlated to the existing built environment (Amrit 1980). Since then, several experimental and numerical studies available in the literature were investigating and assessed the behavior of high-rise buildings under different urban topologies. (Bailey and Kwok 1985), (Taniike 1991) and (Khanduri et al. 2000) performed a series of boundary layer wind tunnel tests to study the dynamic response of a square high-rise building under the effect of a neighboring twin building. Most of the past mentioned studies focused mainly on the overall wind loads and the wind-induced structural responses due to the surrounding effect aiming for structural design. However, only a few pieces of literature were found supporting the design of nonstructural elements for the effect of future buildings on the built environment. For instance, (Irwin 1998) studied the variation in cladding pressure due to the effect of future buildings and developed a methodology to adjust wind tunnel results to compensate for the obtained uncertainty. They reported high suction near the ground and at the top corner of the studied building. (Surry and Djakovich 1995) explored the highest peak suctions developed on the building surfaces of an isolated case only and their relation to the building geometry and turbulence intensity. (Hui et al. 2013) also, investigate the interference effects between two high-rise buildings with the same heights but different shapes and arrangements, the results show an increase in the negative pressures for some cases up to 50% larger than in the isolated case and a decrease of around 30% in other cases depending on the wind direction.

On the other hand, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were also utilized to predict wind-induced responses in high-rise buildings. (Dagnew and Bitsuamlak 2014), (Elshaer et al. 2016) and (Elshaer et al. 2017) evaluated the aerodynamic response of a typical tall building with and without surrounding buildings (i.e. isolated building, two adjacent buildings, complex surrounding buildings) using computational fluid dynamics. They investigated different numerically generated inflow boundary conditions to assess their suitability for Large Eddie Simulations (LES).

However, previous research was limited to a defined number of surrounding buildings with fixed heights not taking into consideration the predicted city growth which did not represent the real development of a surrounding city. Therefore, in this paper, boundary layer wind tunnel tests were performed to investigate and evaluate the impact of city growth on the cladding load of a typical high-rise building adopted from the Commonwealth Advisory Aeronautical Research Council (CAARC) building model. The city growth is represented by different generic surrounding configurations, varying in height ratios compared to the study building. The configurations include an isolated case scenario (0000SH), and surrounding buildings of 25% increase (0025SH), and 75% increase (0075SH) in surrounding height ratios. Maximum positive and minimum negative peak pressures are presented for each tap (i) and evaluated from the cladding design point of view. A realistic case study was also introduced in this paper for further elaboration on the effect of surroundings on cladding design loads.

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