Wind induced pressures and interference effects on a group of cooling towers in a Power Plant arrangement

The structural response of a group of cooling towers in a turbulent wind flow can be completely different from that of an isolated tower due to the interference effects. In this paper the actual wind loads on two cooling towers in a power plant arrangement have been determined through a series of wind tunnel tests, assuming different directions of the wind with respect to the line passing through the axis of the towers. The cooling towers models used are rigid so that interference effects are analyzed only in terms of pressure distributions and not of the structural response. In particular an attempt is made to study the interference effects by means of the orthogonal decomposition of the fluctuations covariance matrix, that allows the reduction of a complex fluctuating pressure field into a set of uncorrelated time functions.