Abstract

A number of studies have been carried out to examine the effect of parapets on roof wind loading. Most of these studies have been carried out in the wind tunnel and rarely has an effort been made to study this effect in full-scale. A systematic and extensive research has been carried out in the present study to evaluate the wind loads on a full-scale building roof with and without parapets. The study has been carried out mainly on an Experimental Building located at Loyola Campus of Concordia University. In the first stage, wind loads were measured on a simple flat roof, and parapets were subsequently placed on the roof in order to study their effect. Wind-tunnel testing of a scale model of the building was carried out at the Building Aerodynamics Laboratory of the Centre for Building Studies. Mean pressure coefficients have generally been recorded for an open country type of exposure. The analysis of experimental results indicates that for all different parapet configurations tested in full-scale, parapets reduce high suctions on the roof corner. However, results of wind-tunnel studies reveal that in the presence of parapets corner suctions increase for ratio h/L (height of parapet/building length) less than 0.02. The study recommends that wind standards and codes of practice consider specifying pressure coefficients for roof corners with parapets in terms of h/L rather than h alone, as it is currently the case