Reduction of Roof Wind Loads by Architectural Features

Abstract

The devastating impact of Hurricane Andrew on the low-rise buildings of southern Florida and coastal Louisiana [Refs. 1 and 2] illustrated that destructive winds may produce very high pressures at some specific locations on a domestic home or light industrial/commercial structure. This study shows that the use of vertical porous screens across the roof comers on this style of building will dramatically reduce the local and area-averaged uplift loads that have to be resisted by the roof. Full-scale and wind-tunnel modelling research is discussed which shows that the regions of extreme uplift on a roof are due to the corner vortices lying on the roof surface. The wind tunnel was then used to investigate the impact of various rigid gauze screens on the formation of these vortices. Ten screen shapes were investigated, each of which reduces the wind uplift loads to varying degrees and may also be an architecturally acceptable addition to the design of a low-rise building.