Improved modeling of gust-driven fluid–structure interaction by realistic turbulent inflow data
Publication date
2026-03-11
Document type
Research article
Organisational unit
Publisher
Elsevier
Series or journal
International Journal of Heat and Fluid Flow
ISSN
Periodical volume
120
Article ID
110366
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
✅
Language
English
DDC Class
000 Informatik, Information & Wissen, allgemeine Werke
500 Naturwissenschaften
600 Technik
Keyword
Turbulent inflow conditions
Horizontal wind gusts
Fluid–structure interaction (FSI)
Coupled numerical FSI simulations
Immersed boundary method
Wind tunnel experiments
Abstract
The present study investigates the significance of realistic inflow conditions for simulating the interaction between horizontal wind gusts and flexible structures. The background of this work is the recent development of an artificial gust generator (Wood et al., 2022) that can be integrated into standard wind tunnels to examine in lab-scale experiments the effects of wind gusts on structures such as civil engineering constructions (tents, buildings, . . . ). In an initial experimental study (Breuer and Neumann, 2024), synchronized measurements of the flow field around a T-shaped structure and its associated structural deformations were conducted. To replicate such an experimental setup by means of numerical simulations, a subsequent study (Breuer et al., 2025) successfully combined a partitioned fluid–structure interaction solver based on the Arbitrary Lagrangian– Eulerian formulation with an immersed boundary method. While the comparison between simulation and experimental data appeared promising, it also revealed certain shortcomings that could be attributed to an inadequate representation of the inflow conditions. The current study addresses these deficiencies in two ways: First, by providing a more realistic description of the reduction in the flow velocity at the outlet of the wind tunnel nozzle due to the increased pressure loss by the gust generator; and second, by incorporating the turbulence intensity of the inflow, which was completely neglected in the previous study for the purpose of simplification and because the low degree of turbulence was not given much importance. To this end, suitable turbulent velocity fluctuations are generated in separate precursor simulations and superimposed on the mean velocity profile. The results clearly demonstrate that prescribing realistic inflow conditions substantially improves the agreement between simulation outcomes and experimental measurements paving the way to more practical applications in the field of gust-structure interactions.
Description
This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Version
Published version
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