Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations of wind-driven rain on a low-rise building : new validation efforts

Despite the establishment of CFD as a tool for calculating the amount of wind-driven rain (WDR) falling onto building facades, very few efforts have been made towards the validation of CFD for this purpose. This paper presents part of a detailed CFD validation study that was conducted at the Laboratory of Building Physics, supported by a new experimental wind, rain and WDR database for a low-rise building. It will be shown that numerical simulation, if conducted with care, can provide quite accurate predictions of the amount of WDR impinging on the building facade and that the main discrepancies in this case were due to a simplification of the upstream wind conditions in the numerical model.