Water Leak Testing of Japanese Tiled Roofs under Vibration and Scattering

This paper describes a water leak test of roof tiles. The 100 roof tiles were set up on 10 lines and 10 rows on the pitched roof in the downstream of the flow from the wind tunnel. The flow velocity was increased gradually from the low velocity to the high velocity, and the effects of the wind on the roof tiles were investigated by the water leak test. The situation of the water leak test was filmed by video camera. Two accelerometers were simultaneously used. The roof tiles which showed significant vibration at any velocity were found in a series of experiments and the accelerometers were attached to the two neighboring roof tiles on the model roof. The water leak phenomena in the experiment by using the artificial rainfall apparatus are discussed in this paper. Some mechanisms with relatively large amplitudes at low-frequency vibrations, which caused water leak phenomena were made clear.