Effects of installation location on the in-service wind load of a tower crane

Abstract

Tower cranes are usually attached to buildings, which affects the crane's aerodynamic configuration, and therefore the wind loads on the tower crane are changed. In this study, a numerical simulation using computational fluid dynamics was carried out to investigate the mean force and moment coefficients of an in-service tower crane at five different locations. A single unattached tower crane was taken as the reference counterpart. The results showed that the building played an important role in reducing the along-wind load of the tower crane. In comparison with the reference tower crane, the average reductions of the along-wind load on the tower crane under longitudinal and transverse arrangements were 53·4% and 52·7%, respectively. For 90° to 180° wind directions, the torsion moments were smaller than those of the reference. The closer the crane was to the building, the smaller was the torsion moment. Among the five locations investigated, longitudinal distance was found to have less effect on the along-wind, across-wind and torsion moment loads on the tower crane than the transverse distance. However, the transverse distance had a great influence for 0° to 90° wind directions. The closer the tower crane was to the corner of the building, the more severe the wind direction deviated from the original direction.