Abstract
Several tornadoes occur each year in Canada, while design guidelines for building structures to withstand tornado events are still in incipient stage. The novel Wind-induced Damage Simulator (WDS) built at the University of Ottawa, capable of simulating pressures induced by multidirectional and tornadic winds was used to test a 1:100 scaled house model in a simulated tornado of 16.5 m/s maximum tangential wind velocity. Three orientation angles of the model placed at three locations along the radius of the tornado were investigated. This replicated different conditions the tornadic flow would approach a residential house. These locations were selected based on a preliminary analysis conducted for 750RPM, 825RPM and 900RPM fan velocities, to characterize the tornado maximum velocity and radius simulated in the WDS facility. The model was instrumented with 96 pressure taps along the roof and the lateral walls and the external pressure coefficients were determined. Negative pressure coefficients of up to −1, were recorded for the roof and wall sides exposed to the tangential velocity of the tornado, for all the investigated cases. The magnitude of the pressure coefficients was found to be in good agreement with the results reported by [2], for same dimensions house model tested in a laboratory simulated tornado, however the pressure distributions on the surface of the tested model were different due to the different tangential velocity simulated in the WDS facility.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the NSERC funding project 210715 and would like to express their gratitude for the continuous support offered by Dr. Muslim Majid and Dr. Gamal Elnabelsy.
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© 2023 Canadian Society for Civil Engineering
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Williams, J., Dragomirescu, E. (2023). Experimental Investigation of Tornado Induced Pressures on Residential Buildings. In: Walbridge, S., et al. Proceedings of the Canadian Society of Civil Engineering Annual Conference 2021 . CSCE 2021. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering, vol 240. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0507-0_43
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0507-0_43
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