Spectators' comfort in sports stadia: impact of roof geometry on wind-driven rain shelter
| Main Authors: | Bert Blocken, Jan Persoon, Twan van Hooff, Jan Carmeliet, Martin de Wit |
|---|---|
| Format: | info Proceeding |
| Terbitan: |
, 2008
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| Online Access: |
https://zenodo.org/record/3561632 |
Daftar Isi:
- Apart from sports purposes, stadia are also increasingly being used for concerts and other events with large spectator attendance. The main aspect for spectator comfort in open stadia is protection from wind and rain. In the design of many existing stadia however, rain shelter has insufficiently been taken into account because most roofs have been designed with vertical rainfall in mind, while no consideration has been given to the possibility of rain being blown onto the stands and spectators by wind (wind-driven rain). Adequate rain shelter should be addressed during the design stage of new sports and football stadia. Currently however, almost no information or guidelines on this matter are available. This paper presents an investigation of the impact of roof geometry on rain shelter. 2D Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations and Lagrangian particle tracking are performed to analyse the wind flow pattern and rainfall distribution in seven generic stadium configurations and to assess the performance of each roof type. Although most existing stadium roofs are built with a light to medium upward slope towards the field, the analysis indicates that roofs with a downward slope of 13° provide significantly better rain shelter. This paper will demonstrate that the reason is not only the well-known trigonometric shielding effect. This effect refers to the rain shelter that can theoretically be obtained by assuming that raindrop trajectories are straight lines. This study will show that, in addition to the trigonometric shielding effect, downward sloping roofs restrict the extent of the primary vortex in the stadium and generate a sufficiently strong counter-rotating secondary vortex below the roof that sweeps the rain away from the stands. This specific feature appears to occur only for roofs with a sufficiently large downward slope. As a result, downward sloping roofs are clearly superior in terms of rain shelter compared to traditional roof types with an upward slope towards the field.
- Presenters: name: Jan Persoon affiliation: (Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The Netherlands) email: