Abstract: Wind load is one of mainly lateral loads on structures in atmospheric boundary layer. Aimed to the method of theoretical computation and Computational Fluid Dynamics that are adopted by engineering widely, the principle about two methods to compute the wind pressure and wind loads on structures is elaborated. Furthermore, the pressure distributions on a simple structure with different elevation are numerically computed based on the Reynolds-averaged N-S equations and the standard k-ε turbulent model, and the characteristics of the wind pressures on the structure are discussed, then two computational methods are compared. The computed results show that the wind loads on the structure computed by numerical method are lower than those of theoretical method because the fluctuating wind loads on the structure are ignored. But, CFD can obtain more information for the parameters in wind field, and it is more convenience for computation of wind loads on structures with complex shape.
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Key words: wind loads, atmospheric boundary layer, computational method, structures