Internal pressure dynamics of a leaky building with a dominant opening

A simplified and computationally efficient model of internal pressure response of a building with a dominant opening and background leakage is presented based on certain simplifications shown to be adequate for all practical purposes. The presented model adequately linearized is used to develop closed form non-dimensional design solutions that can be used to estimate the ratio of internal to external pressure fluctuations and gust factors for a range of building volumes, opening sizes and porosity ratios. Experiments carried out with different combination of leakages in the presence of dominant openings of various sizes are used to justify the simplifications adopted in the derivation of the model and validate the model predictions. A performance analysis of the model carried out in conjunction with some approaches found in the literature on benchmarking data exhibits the relative advantage of the model in terms of accuracy, practical usage and computational expense.

► Internal pressure response of leaky buildings with dominant openings. ► Simple and computationally efficient but reasonably accurate analytical model. ► Damping of helmholtz resonance by background leakage. ► Closed form non-dimensionalized design solutions. ► Quasi-steady behavior of the lumped leakage system. ► Wind tunnel experiments to validate the model predictions.