CFD and PIV study of the airflow in and around a saddle-shaped double-roofed stadium

Abstract eng:
The aerodynamic behavior of the roof of an open-air stadium is an important design consideration to ensure comfortable thermal conditions in the occupied zone. This is crucial for the design of stadia in hot climates, which relies on an accurate assessment of the interaction between the wind and the building. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are a valuable tool to predict the wind conditions in and around stadia, as they provide a continuous solution of the flow field. Validation with wind tunnel data is recommended to support the reliability of CFD results, but relatively few experimental data are available for large and geometrically complex structures. Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) is an optical technique that captures the instantaneous velocity fields over an extended 2D region and provides high spatial resolution data, which may be used for CFD validation. This study focuses on the comparison between the CFD simulations and PIV measurements of a doubleroofed stadium with saddle-shaped roof for the wind directions corresponding to the convex and concave roof profiles. Isothermal CFD simulations were performed using OpenFOAM-Ext using a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) turbulence model; PIV measurements were conducted on a 1:200 scale physical model in the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel of BMT Fluid Mechanics. The results point out the different flow mechanisms that occur for the two wind directions and show good performance of CFD to reproduce the wind pattern around the stadium. Some issues related with the time scale and the geometrical representation of the stadium in the two cases are discussed in the paper.

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