Two-way coupled fluid-structure interaction method on aerodynamic analysis of tall timber building using URANS

Abstract

The structural response of tall building to aerodynamic excitation can be simulated with the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for wind flow and finite element method (FEM) for structural modelling. This study presents a two-way coupled fluid-structure interaction (FSI) method on aerodynamic analysis of a tall timber building using CFD-FEM co-simulation. To attain low computational cost, the flow is modelled in conjunction with unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes (URANS) equations and SST k-ω turbulence model. Tall timber building ‘Mjøstårnet’ is chosen as case study and modelled structurally by use of FEM. Aerodynamic behaviour of Mjøstårnet under different wind conditions is investigated. A two-time steps FSI method is proposed to resolve convergence issue on pressure field in CFD when time-varying velocity profile such as gust is imposed, without demanding excessive mesh refinement or smaller computational domain. This allows complex aerodynamic analysis using URANS.