Low-rise buildings - Wind Loading of Structures - page 199

and dynamic pressures and in modelling the hedges in the upwind terrain at the full-scale
site (Sill et al., 1989, 1992).
In the late 1980s, two new full-scale experiments on low-rise buildings were set up in
Lubbock, Texas, United States, and Silsoe, United Kingdom. The Lubbock experiment,
known as the Texas Tech Field Experiment, comprised a small steel shed of height 4.0 m
and plan dimensions 9.1 and 13.7 m; the building had a near-flat roof (Figure 8.3). The
building had the unique capability of being mounted on a turntable, thus enabling control
of the building orientation relative to the mean wind direction. Pressures were measured
with high-response pressure transducers mounted close to the pressure tappings on the
roof and walls; the transducers were moved around to different positions at different
times during the course of the experiments. A 50 m-high mast upwind of the building, in
the prevailing wind direction, had several levels of
Figure 8.3 Texas Tech Field Experiment
(United States 1987-).
anemometers, enabling the approaching wind properties to be well defined. The upwind
terrain was quite flat and open. The reference static pressure was obtained from an
underground box, 23 m away from the centre of the test building (Levitan and Mehta,
1992a, b).
The Texas Tech Experiment produced a large amount of wind pressure data for a
variety of wind directions. External and internal pressures, with and without dominant
openings in the walls, were recorded. Very high extreme pressures at the windward
corner of the roof for 'quartering' winds blowing directly on to the corner, at about 45° to
the walls, were measured; these were considerably greater than those measured at
equivalent positions on small 1/100 scale wind-tunnel models. The internal pressures,
however, showed similar characteristics to those measured on wind-tunnel models and
predicted by theoretical models.