Computational simulation of the wind-force on metal meshes

Abstract

[Abstract]: Estimating the drag force on a metal mesh is important if the installed metal mesh area is large and wind speeds are moderate. Such a situation may arise if a metal mesh is used to protect a property from ember attacks in a bushfire prone area. In this work, computational simulations are used to correlate the drag coefficient of a metal mesh in terms of its porosity and the Reynolds number for 10 ≤ Re ≤ 1000. A benchmarking exercise suggests that the computational simulations may be in error by up to 13 % error for the level of discretization that could be achieved due to computer memory limitations. The drag coefficient correlation we have obtained has a maximum error of only 6.5 % with respect to the results from the simulations.