Wind-tunnel tests and design loads of the roof of the New Karaiskaki olympic stadium in Piraeus

The paper presents the experimental tests carried out in the Boundary-Layer Wind Tunnel (BLWT) for the design of the roof of the new Olympic soccer stadium in Piraeus, Greece, and some results of the Finite Element (F.E.) analyses performed. The roof covers all the stands of the stadium and is supported by 14 cantilevered steel lattice structures with a span of about 33 m. Due to the vicinity of the site to the sea, the wind loading has an important influence on the design of the roof, whose peculiar shape let arise some doubts about the actual distribution of the wind loads, i.e. on the pattern of pressure coefficients (cp) over the entire roof. For every wind direction investigated, the following quantities have been evaluated: mean values of the aerodynamic coefficients cp, standard deviation of cp, maximum and minimum values of cp. Finally, the recorded data have been used for the numerical simulation of the dynamic response of the structure in Time Domain, whose aim is the definition of the design loads of the steel lattice structures.