Sensitivity investigation on the pressure coefficients non-dimensionalization

The scaling of large structures to investigate their aerodynamics in wind tunnels is a common and robust procedure to estimate important magnitudes, including pressure coefficients. Different aspects can affect the estimation of pressure coefficients; four examples are the non-dimensionalization, blockage, non-stationarity, and non-Gaussianity of the wind tunnel velocity. This paper shows the variability of pressure coefficients due to these four aspects for the case study of a closed box section of a suspended bridge. It was estimated that the pressure coefficients of similar pressure taps vary significantly due to different sets of wind velocity time history used to non-dimensionalize the wind tunnel pressures. In addition, the stationarity of the wind velocity process was not confirmed for all wind velocity sets and the non-Gaussianity of the wind velocity time history was confirmed.