Abstract

Designers of tower cranes must consider many variables when translating the interaction between air flow and a structure into an integral force.
Synthesizing the variables makes the calculations more precise and easier to perform, without compromising safety margins.
Industry regulations must also be followed in creating appropriate predictive models for evaluating the effect of airflow on these cranes. The reference standard for calculating the wind loads acting on a tower crane are conceptually simple and easy to implement and include many rules and parameters that can help designers to evaluate the shielding effects of components’ shapes. However, engineers must typically be guided by their intuition and experience to understand how much one element is shielded by another and how intensely they are affected by the air flow.
This article proposes the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to address these complexities.

Terex is a registered trademark of Terex Corporation in the United States of America and many other countries