Local wind pressures acting on walls of low-rise buildings and comparisons to the Japanese and US wind loading provisions

• Peak local wind pressures on walls of low-rise buildings were examined.
• Zoning of the wall loads is only necessary for suction loads.
• Zoning based on building height rather than building dimensions appears to be more suitable to some extent.
• The comparisons with the AIJ Recommendations and ASCE7-10 are presented.

This paper examines peak external wind pressures acting on walls of low-rise buildings using various parameters. Results indicate that positive pressure distribution is relatively uniform regardless of parameters considered and its magnitude decreases as averaging area size becomes larger. Large suction pressure distribution occurs at lateral edges of walls and its magnitude does not average out with increasing averaging area size as rapidly as for positive pressure. Based on these observations, we find that zoning of wall area for design purposes is only necessary for wall suction pressures. We further find that it is more suitable to base zoning on building height to some extent. When the present results are compared with the design values in the AIJ Recommendations for Loads and Buildings in Japan, the design values significantly underestimate positive wall pressures for small averaging areas, but the degree of underestimation diminishes as area becomes larger. Similarly, design values underestimate negative wall pressures up to an area of 10 m2, but begin to overestimate past that point. A similar observation was made for a comparison with ASCE7-10; however, the degree of overestimation of negative code values at larger areas was smaller than the one observed in the comparison with the AIJ Recommendations.