Coupling approaches to simulate dynamic wind effects on a membrane structure with ponding water

Abstract

This paper proposes two coupling approaches to simulate the effect of wind loads on membrane structures loaded with water ponds. The first method couples a two-phase solver, simulating the wind–water system, with a structural solver, simulating the membrane structure. This is a relatively straightforward approach applied to a new application and it can be considered excessive because the water only occupies a fraction of the wind domain. Therefore, a novel approach is proposed which uses different solvers and domain sizes to simulate the effect of the wind, water and membrane structure. The main assumption in this method is that the wind–water interaction is negligible compared to their interactions with the membrane structure. This approach strongly couples the structural solver with the wind and the water solver where in every coupling iteration forces from both fluid solvers are added and applied. On the other hand, the structural solver provides the displacement to both fluid solvers. The main advantage of this method is that it makes the simulation modular. It was found that neglecting the interaction between the wind and water did not cause significant deviation in the results while the computation was more efficient than the first approach.