Peak pressure computation on a low-rise building using a wind gust as inflow

Wind gusts have been used as inflow turbulence in the aeronautical, automobile, and wind energy industries. However, this approach has not yet been widely adopted by the wind engineering community. In this study, a similar gust inflow is used to compute peak pressures on the Texas Tech University (TTU) building to evaluate performance and viability of this approach. Large Eddy Simulations (LES) were conducted for five cases including no gust inflow, discrete gust, and continuous gust profiles as inflow. The results were compared with and assessed against wind tunnel measurements at 1:50 and 1:6 scales, as well as full-scale field data, and close agreement was achieved in this foundational study. Flow structure and vortex-vortex interaction (VVI) is visualized, analyzed and compared for cases with and without gust inflow using time varying plots. The overall results suggest that the gust profile as inflow approach developed here holds promise as a practical and computationally efficient alternative to existing synthetic turbulence generation methods used in civil wind engineering for simulating transient wind loads on buildings. However, further improvement in the definition of the gust profile and the computational setup is necessary to improve accuracy and applicability across different building types and flow conditions.