Numerical estimation of transient driving rain loads on building envelopes and full-scale experimental verification

An existing numerical technique for driving rain simulation is incorporated into a practical numerical method to estimate the spatial and temporal distribution of driving rain loads on building envelopes. The method only requires input of the building geometry and of basic climatic data at the building site: wind speed, wind direction and rainfall intensity. We applied it for a series of spells around a low-rise building and the numerical results are experimentally verified. It is shown that the numerical method can accurately estimate driving rain loads on building envelopes. In addition, a weighted averaging technique for climatic data to be used in driving rain estimation is proposed. Its performance is compared to that of currently used averaging techniques and shows to be good whereas the other averaging techniques can give large errors.