Abstract: | The wind has been regarded as an important criterion in designing building environments since the early days of human settlement. In hot, arid regions of Iran building is designed such as to have adequate protection against the wind storms and also they had provided summer time air conditioning by means of passive cooling. Most of such buildings are domed roof structures. In order to observe wind environment over such structures, simple models of these vaulted roof buildings are made and tested in a two dimensional low speed wind tunnel for low velocity smoke flows.Flow pattern over and around the models are visualized and photographed. From the observations, several features such as flow separation, turbulence, wind shadow area and flow circulation have been identified for different building configurations. |