WIND CFD ANALISYS FOR ESPAÑA BUILDING IN MADRID

The Spain building is located at Plaza de España in Madrid, constituting since 1953 that it was completed, a substantial part of the representative image of the axis of España Plaza- Gran Vía – Cibeles.

In 2017,  Baraka Global Invest S.L bought of the building and launched several technical research assignments on the structural part the building so that they serve as the basis for the drafting of the future reform projects. Preliminary analyzes revealed the lack of effective structural systems in the building. To deal with horizontal wind actions, it is therefore necessary to include among the reform activities, providing the structure with sufficient capacity against wind actions.

The direct application of the building regulations (CTE) showed a significant lack of transverse resistance (not due to rigidity), which led to the design of expensive reinforcement systems, forming vertical cores that were difficult to match with the functional use of space and of expensive execution, incompatible in terms with the planning of the investment.

Due to the above, the MC2 Estudio de Ingeniería is commissioned to analyze, with the maximum possible detail and technically admissible by the regulations, the action of wind on the building. A geometric development in detail of the environment, together with the realization of several numerical simulations of the movement of the wind (Computing Fluid Dynamics, CFD), led to the reduction of the wind actions, and the consequent need for reinforcement, to guarantee an admissible range and compatible with the investment planned by the property.