Abstract
Due to the complex terrain around high-speed railways, the windbreaks were established along different landforms, resulting in irregular windbreak transition regions between different subgrade infrastructures (flat ground, cutting, embankment, etc). In this paper, the effect of a windbreak transition on the wind flow around railways subjected to crosswinds was studied. Wind tunnel testing was conducted to study the wind speed change around a windbreak transition on flat ground with a uniform wind speed inflow, and the collected data were used to validate a numerical simulation based on a detached eddy simulation method. The validated numerical method was then used to investigate the effect of the windbreak transition from the flat ground to cutting (the “cutting” is a railway subgrade type formed by digging down from the original ground) for three different wind incidence angles of 90º, 75º, and 105º. The deterioration mechanism of the flow fields and the reasons behind the occurrence of the peak wind velocities were explained in detail. The results showed that for the windbreak transition on flat ground, the impact was small. For the transition from the flat ground to the cutting, the influence was relatively large. The significant increase in the wind speeds was due to the right-angle structure of the windbreak transition, which resulted in sudden changes of the wind velocity as well as the direction. In addition, the height mismatch in the transition region worsened the protective effect of a typical windbreak.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 309-322 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Wind and Structures, An International Journal |
Volume | 35 |
Issue number | 5 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 30 Nov 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 52202426, U1334205). the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2020YFA0710903), the Open Project of Key Laboratory of Traffic Safety on Track of Ministry of Education, Central South University (Grant No. 502401002), the Hong Kong and Macau Joint Research and Development Fund of Wuyi University (Grant No. 2019WGALH15, 2019WGALH17, and 2021WGALH15), and the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province, China (Grant No. 2020JJ4737).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Techno Press. All rights reserved.
Keywords
- computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
- crosswinds
- flow structures
- railway
- wind tunnel test
- windbreak transition
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Civil and Structural Engineering
- Building and Construction
- Modelling and Simulation