Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Influence of wind tunnel test duration on wind load factors

Published

Author(s)

Dat Duthinh, Adam L. Pintar, Emil Simiu

Abstract

A methodology is presented for calculating the uncertainty associated with the estimation of peak pressure coefficients from wind tunnel test records of various lengths, and how this uncertainty affects design wind effects. Investigation of time series belonging to five categories of pressure coefficients implicit in the ASCE 7-10 Standard shows that uncertainties in the peak pressure coefficients with coefficients of variation as high as 20 % typically increase the design wind effects by 6 % or less. For typical civil engineering wind tunnels, this result implies that such small increases are also inherent in test durations as low as 10 s, corresponding to prototype durations of less than 6 min. These results provide useful indications on minimum lengths of pressure records to be measured in wind tunnels.
Citation
Journal of Structural Engineering-ASCE

Keywords

coefficient of variation, extreme value distribution, load factor, peak-over-threshold, pressure coefficient, sampling error, statistical independence, uncertainty, test duration, wind tunnel test. coefficient of variation, extreme value distribution, load factor, peak-over-threshold, pressure coefficient, sampling error, statistical independence, uncertainty, test duration, wind tunnel test. coefficient of variation, extreme value distribution, load factor, peak-over-threshold, pressure coefficient, sampling error, statistical independence, uncertainty, test duration, wind tunnel test.

Citation

Duthinh, D. , Pintar, A. and Simiu, E. (2018), Influence of wind tunnel test duration on wind load factors, Journal of Structural Engineering-ASCE (Accessed April 26, 2024)
Created August 16, 2018, Updated August 17, 2020