Influence of Topography on Wind Pressures in Tanks Using CFD

Abstract

The influence of topography on wind pressures acting on structures has been of interest to the civil engineering community for some time; however, because of the complexity of the problem, only few cases have been solved. The evaluation of pressures in tanks located in hills is one of those complex problems and has not been addressed in the literature. This paper presents a computational fluid dynamics simulation of the problem, in which the domain including the hill and the tank is discretized using finite elements. The results show that the actual location of the tank with respect to a hill has a significant influence on the pressures, so that tanks located at the top of a hill undergo severe increases in pressure coefficients and also changes in pressure distributions around the tank.