Investigation of Wind Loading on a Multi-span Anticlastic Tensile Membrane Surface: A CFD Approach

The determination of the wind loads of tensile membrane structures is of crucial importance during their design, since the extremely light weight of the structures can easily lead to severe wind effects on the doubly curved surfaces. According to the current state of the art, almost exclusively wind tunnel test is applied, which is the most reliable method today. On the other hand, the time and cost-consumption of the physical measurements, as well as the questions around the Reynolds number dependency of the wind loads, are serious bottlenecks of such an experimental method. Computational Fluid Dynamics offers an excellent and flexible tool to overcome such problems, but the currently available computational powers prevent the application of robust and high-fidelity scale-resolving methods. The paper deals with the Computational Wind Engineering-based determination of the mean wind loads on a doubly curved tensile membrane structure, applying the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes framework. The conventional k-ω Shear Stress Transport and the recently developed generalized k-ω turbulence models are applied in the simulations. The latter model provides a set of tunable model parameters, where the modification of the coefficients is much clearer and straightforward compared to other turbulence closure models. By tuning the relevant parameter during the simulations, the second model provided significantly better results. The numerical results are validated against experimental data from previous wind tunnel measurements. The internal forces of the membrane in the principal directions of the orthotropic membrane material are computed, and the maximal values of the experimental and numerical-based distributions are compared.