Foreword
The legacy of Asia-Pacific Conference on Wind Engineering (APCWE) starts with the first event held at Roorkee/India (1985), moving on to Beijing/China (1989), Hong Kong/China (1993), Gold Coast/Australia (1997), Tokyo/Japan (2001), Seoul/Korea (2005) and Taipei/Taiwan (2009). APCWE is an international event regularly convened every four years under the umbrella of International Association for Wind Engineering (IAWE), with participation by wind engineering researchers and practitioners from in and around Asia and Pacific regions. Outcome of these conferences has led to fine tuning of policy changes, standards and wind engineering-related codes, and, as a whole, expanded the vistas of knowledge in the field of wind engineering. The Eighth Asia-Pacific Conference on Wind Engineering is organized by CSIR-Structural Engineering Research Centre in Chennai during December 10–14, 2013.
CSIR-Structural Engineering Research Centre (CSIR-SERC) is a constituent National Laboratory under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Government of India. The Centre has established a state-of-the-art Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel (BLWT) facility with sophisticated instruments including Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) system and full-scale experimental facilities using Sonic Anemometers, and is also working on the emerging area of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for more than two and a half decades.
After critical review by members of the International Scientific Advisory Board and other experts in the field of wind engineering from India and abroad, 161 papers from 17 countries have been selected for presentation and publication in the conference proceedings. The conference themes cover aeroelasticity, bluff body aerodynamics, boundary layer wind tunnel testing, bridge aerodynamics, codes of practice/international standards on wind loads, computational fluid dynamics, field measurements and health monitoring, low- and high-rise buildings, urban flow dispersion modeling, wind engineering and wind disaster mitigation, wind energy and applications, wind environment/human comfort, wind-structure interaction, wind climate assessment and climate modeling, instrumentation and control, atmospheric modeling, etc. There are 12 keynote speeches and 4 invited talks by experts in the field of wind engineering. While keynote/invited papers and extended abstracts are included in the printed volume of conference proceedings, full-length and keynote/invited papers are given in the credit card flash drive.
I wish to express my appreciation to all the reviewers and participating authors for their valuable contribution that makes this conference a successful event. I specially thank the keynote/invited speakers for sparing precious time in preparing their papers and for presentation at the conference. I take this opportunity to thank all the sponsors for their active participation in the conference and financial support, in spite of global recession in engineering and service sectors. International Association for Wind Engineering (IAWE) deserves a special thanks for its active involvement throughout the course of the conference and financial support for participation of young researchers/students. Cooperation from Indian Society for Wind Engineering is sincerely acknowledged.
I appreciate the remarkable services rendered by the International Scientific Advisory Board, Local Organizing Committee and a number of Internal Committees formed for smooth conduct of the conference.
Nagesh R. Iyer
Chairman, APCWE-VIII