Abstract
The landfall of hurricane Laura and Delta during the 2020 hurricane season cost the Southwest Louisiana Area (SWLA) $19 billion and $2.9 billion in damage respectively. Since then, the need to use computational fluid dynamics to study hurricane effects on buildings to reduce damage costs is more alarming. In this research, common residential building designs will be put under different levels of hurricane size winds and barometric pressure conditions from different directions through CFD simulations. The effect of the roof shape, size, and placement on the pressure, shear stress, and eddies acting on the roof will be studied since they are the major causes of roof damage on a building during a hurricane. The objective of this research is to identify the areas of a building’s roof most vulnerable to damage during a hurricane, to ensure reinforcements to prevent future damage. Higher category hurricanes are more likely to cause roof damage due to the lower barometric pressure and higher Reynold’s number characteristics the possess. In the CFD simulation, a Steady and Unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) turbulence model will be used. Also, a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) turbulence model will be used to study the flow structure in the domain.
