Assessing wind-driven rain loads on traditional buildings using computational fluid dynamics and 3D digital documentation data

Moisture in building fabric from wind-driven rain (WDR) is associated with several erosion decay mechanisms. To relate the WDR load to known issues from moisture in traditional buildings, several methods can be used to calculate WDR loads on building facades. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) enables detailed modelling of WDR for buildings by simulating coupled wind flow and rainfall, but implementations for traditional buildings often use simplified hard surface modelling of architectural details. We apply the open source OpenFOAM windDrivenRainFoam solver to 3D digital documentation survey data for Melrose Abbey, Scotland. This approach enables detailed representation of building geometry with flexibility to change resolution as required, based on an accurate high resolution geometric dataset.