Never before have architects and engineers had a chance to be so creative when designing a new building! Only recently the economical and technical advancements have allowed them to build unimaginable shapes and forms.
Site conditions, economical aspects, architecture, and engineering considerations open new architectural design opportunities. At the same time, designing buildings is an increasingly complex business, influenced by many different disciplines. Here in Ingrid Cloud we believe that aerodynamics must one of them!
Ingrid Cloud is a wind simulation platform that makes it possible for architects and urban designers to run wind analysis in the earliest stage of the design process. With Ingrid Cloud running even large and precise CFD simulations is a fairly simple task that will provide important data to orient their design choices.
This is Bridgewater Place Tower, the tallest building in the city of Leeds, England. The wind hits the side of the building at the height of 70-100 meters and then it’s pushed downwards and around to the side. The gust is getting stronger as it reaches the street level. It is a common urban wind behavior called the Downwash Effect.
In this scenario, the building acts as a funnel, squeezing a large volume of air into a smaller space, forcing the wind speeds to accelerate with more than 5 times! That wind flows represented in the following simulation: