Full-scale flow measurement on a tall building with a continuous-wave Doppler Lidar anemometer

While building aerodynamics have been widely studied, most investigations have been conducted in wind tunnels or through computational simulation. Full-scale experiments are least common, as they are usually costly, require significant time and effort and are subject to uncontrolled meteorological conditions. This research examines the feasibility of using a continuous-wave Doppler Lidar, as opposed to traditional experimental instrumentation for flow measurements around full-scale buildings. The normalised mean velocities and the turbulence intensities measured around a full-size, nominally cuboid building in suburban terrain were compared to results from Cobra multi-hole pressure probes mounted on the full-size building and from a 1/100-scale wind-tunnel test. The normalised mean velocities measured in the tests were within 2% of each other; however, the turbulence intensities obtained from the wind-tunnel experiments were 2-6% higher than the nominal value of 14% measured in the full-scale testing. These effects appeared mainly due to the relatively low sampling frequency of the Lidar, combined with the spatial averaging over a relatively large area. It was concluded that Lidar instrumentation shows promise for characterising the flowfield around full-scale buildings, if the scanning cone angle can be reduced and the sampling rate increased