Investigations of adverse wind loads on a large cooling tower for the six-tower combination

• The wind tunnel tests on a group of six cooling towers are carried out.
• Twenty-seven types of pressure distribution curves are proposed.
• A fifteen-term trigonometric function is utilized to fit two wind load patterns.
• The local buckling factor and construction cost are adopted to evaluate wind effects.
• The most adverse wind load pattern of all is the symmetrical distribution.

Wind-induced pressures are measured on a group of six cooling towers during a series of boundary layer wind tunnel tests, which varied among two tower arrangements, three tower spacings and sixteen wind directions. Based on the statistical results of wind pressures on the throat level, twenty-seven types of pressure distribution curves including nine symmetrical distributions and eighteen asymmetrical distributions are proposed and fitted by the fifteen-term trigonometric function with seven sine terms, seven cosine terms and one constant term. The local buckling factor and construction cost are adopted to compare wind effects induced by the twenty-seven types of wind loads. The results show that there are three symmetrically distributed and three asymmetrically distributed wind loads, which can lead to more severe wind effects. The most adverse wind load pattern of all is the symmetrical distribution with the largest pressures around the stagnation point area, largest suctions in both sideward regions and lowest suctions in the leeward region.