Abstract
This study aims to measure the gust factor for the pedestrian wind environment by the small thermistor anemometer in the wind tunnel experiment. Firstly, the non-directionality and bias of the probe of the small thermistor anemometer were investigated. Then, the measurement performance by the small thermistor anemometer for capturing the peak wind speed at the pedestrian-level around an isolated building was tested. It was found that the thermistor anemometer can accurately capture the turbulence fluctuations up to approximately 5 Hz. In strong wind regions near the side wall of the building, the peak factor and gust factor measured by the thermistor anemometer were 3.0 and 1.5, respectively. The measured factors were in good agreement with that obtained by large-eddy simulation. Moreover, the measured gust factor in this study was found to qualitatively agree with the empirical equation of the gust factor in the full field measurement. In future study, the relation between the peak gust and the 3s moving average period, and the underestimation of the gust factor in low wind region will be further investigated.
