The wind flow over low-rise buildings lying in close vicinity in urban areas generates flow interference effects. The interference effect causes problems related to pollution, pedestrian comfort and ventilation within the buildings thus promoting a lot of research interest in this area during the last forty years.

The issues are more complex to comprehend when there is a cluster of buildings and the wind flow over each of these buildings gets affected due to the presence of another. The wake and its characteristics of a building have drawn attention for various applications like dispersion of pollutants downwind of conventional or nuclear power plants, airport runway interference effect, take-off/landing limitation at heliports, pedestrian wind comfort and wind loads on structures. One of the primary reasons for any physical phenomenon around an earth-fixed bluff body such as a building is the pressure and its distribution. To understand the significance of each of these phenomena mentioned above, it is necessary to study the pressure distribution around a single building model. Experiments have been conducted in a subsonic wind tunnel to verify the numerically obtained pressure coefficients (C_p) over a single low-rise building with and without an opening. Three different wind speeds such as 10m/s, 15m/s and 20m/s have been considered for the experiments. The comparison between the experimental and numerical values of C_p has been quite satisfactory. The effect of an opening in the walls has been observed to be quite significant on the overall pressure distribution. The C_p distribution around a single low-rise building inside a cluster of another four buildings was also quite inspiring to study further on the behavior of wind interference effect. A numerical simulation using large eddy simulation (LES) technique of the CFD (computational fluid dynamics) solver has also been carried out to compute the C_p along with other flow variables. The comparison between the measured values of pressure distribution (C_p)  through the wind tunnel simulation and that obtained from the simulation using commercial CFD solver has been presented.

wind effects, large eddy simulation, experimental study, building with an opening, cluster of buildings, low-rise.