Wind-Induced Interference Effects on a 125 m Tall RC Chimney in Typical Power Plant

This paper presents the details of the wind tunnel investigations carried out on the aeroelastic behaviour of a tall RC chimney in the presence of surrounding structures for two typical power plant layouts in India. The RC chimney under investigation considered as a principal chimney has uniform diameter of 10.41 m and height of 124.5 m. The surrounding structures include 275 m tall chimney considered as interfering chimney and other power plant structures with the c/c distance-to-diameter ratio of 16 (layout-1) and 25 (layout-2) between principal chimney and interfering chimney. Experiments were conducted on the models with a geometric scale of 1:250 under simulated boundary layer conditions in the wind tunnel facility at CSIR-SERC, Chennai. Both the layouts are tested for various wind incidence angles and reduced velocity (\(\overline{U }/{n}_{0}D\)) ranges from 1.8 to 6.56. From the previous research works carried out, the magnification factor was observed to be maximum when the principal chimney is in downstream and interfering chimney is at 0° ± 15°. In this work, the maximum magnification factor was noticed to occur when the interfering chimney is at 15°, 180°, 210° for layout-1 and 35°, 65°, 320° for layout-2. In addition to the magnification factor, the variation of maximum interference factor for the resultant bending moment at critical wind speed with respect to the angle wind incidence was also discussed.