Abstract
The objective of this study is to investigate applicabilities of the computational fluid technique to the wind resistant problems of buildings and structures. It is important for the evaluation of aerodynamic characteristics to grasp the unsteady behavior of separated flows and the vortex structures around a building. Therefore, we use the interpolation method on the staggered grid system. According to the previous computational examples for the fundamental flows, the predicted values by this method are in good agreement with those obtained by the spectral method. First, we calculate the rotating cone problem to estimate numerical errors of the interpolation method. Also we simulate the low-Reynolds-number flows around a rectangular cylinder with a section of various depth/breadth ratios. The upstream-shifted interpolation method is employed for the computation at higher Reynolds numbers. It is found that the present method can reasonably predict the flow patterns and aerodynamic characteristics of bluff cylinders within the limit of low-Reynolds-number flows, so the numerical scheme with high accuracy and conservation property is expecting for the wind resistant problems.
