Peak loading and surface pressure fluctuations of a tall model building

•New inflow method for LES was used to predict the pressure fluctuations.•Peak surface pressure was in anti-phase correlation with that on the opposing lateral building face.•Peak lateral velocity in the wake was correlated with the peak pressure on the lateral faces.•LES confirmed that the PDF of surface pressure fluctuations is non-Gaussian.

Using a recently developed inflow generation approach (Kim et al., 2013), Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) of the flow over the Commonwealth Advisory Aeronautical Council (CAARC) standard tall building has been performed. The surface pressure fluctuations were calculated and are shown to be in reasonable agreement with the measurements in the literature. Numerical experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of the inflow turbulence intensity and integral length scales. Previous research, e.g. Surry and Djakovich (1995) and Huang et al. (2007), suggests a presence of periodicity in the lateral forces on tall buildings, indicating a correlation of the surface pressures on the building's lateral faces. This paper also focuses on the correlations of surface pressure, local wall-normal forces and cross-wind velocity.