Effect of Pressure Coefficient on a Rural House Due to the Neighboring Building’s Arrangement Using Low-Speed Wind Tunnel Test

Most of the rural houses in Malaysia especially in the Northern region of Peninsula Malaysia experienced severe damage during windstorm events due to the lack of engineering consideration. Moreover, these types of houses are also mostly made from timber or a combination of concrete and wood. Therefore, the study on the effects of wind flow surrounding the rural houses as the low-rise building becomes the focus of the present study. Generally, rural houses will be surrounded by other structures such as houses and trees. Thus, the main objective of this study is to analyze the wind tunnel simulation of wind pressure on a rural house due to the effect of the surrounding building’s arrangements. The rural house model that has been scaled down has been tested in the wind tunnel to simulate the wind flow toward the rural house, resulting in pressure distribution and flow visualization surrounding the house. By comparing the value of pressure coefficient (CP) and the flow visualization, this study comes out with the most suitable location and arrangement of neighboring buildings for the rural house which is Case 2 with CP = 2.179 for the highest pressure and CP = -1.997 for the highest suction that occurred at the roof house. It can be concluded that the arrangement for Case 2 has the balance pressure and suction among the three cases since the pressure and suction that occurred at the roof house are not too high compared to other arrangements.