Toward an Efficient Practice for Computational Wind Load Evaluation of Low-Rise Buildings

Controlling wind-induced load is crucial for low-rise building designs to achieve optimal resilience. A numerical approach using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can be employed to assess the wind load during the initial stage of the design process, where a faster response can be secured, given the advancement in computational capacities over the past decades. Many factors, such as computational domain size and grid specifications, can influence the accuracy and efficiency of wind load evaluation using CFD simulations. This paper aims to examine CFD simulation’s efficiency and accuracy in wind load evaluation for low-rise buildings with gable roof geometry in two stages. The first stage will assess the impact of the computational domain size that involves the distances from the building to the boundary wall condition, which includes distances from the benchmark building to inflow, outflow, and no-slip walls. The second stage will investigate the impact of the computational domain discretization scheme, shape, and size. The study shows that computational domain size and discretization can be significant sources of error that can reach 29%, compromising the reliability of wind load predictions. The domain grid specification induced a considerable error of over 14%, precisely when tetrahedral grid shapes were used. The proposed recommendations introduce a practical approach to selecting domain size and discretization that can significantly impact the efficacy of computational wind load evaluation for low-rise building geometry.