Wind engineering

Wind engineering as a separate discipline can be traced to the UK in the 1960s, when informal meetings were held at the National Physical Laboratory, the Building Research Establishment, and elsewhere.

[2] Alan Garnett Davenport was one of the most prominent contributors to the development of wind engineering.

Typically, buildings are designed to resist a strong wind with a very long return period, such as 50 years or more.

These can use an appropriately scaled model in a boundary-layer wind tunnel, or more recently, use of computational fluid dynamics techniques has increased.

Vertical wind-speed profiles result in different wind speeds at the blades nearest to the ground level compared to those at the top of blade travel, and this, in turn, affects the turbine operation.