Aerodynamic mitigation of origami-inspired building structures subjected to hurricane wind loads

Natural hazards are among the largest construction challenges today. By taking dynamic building envelopes designed using origami and kirigami principles, a more comprehensive structure can be built to sustain impacts by high winds. By combining a wind tunnel for small-scale simulation of hurricane conditions and computational analysis for full-scale buildings, a comparison can be made to find differences between experimental data collected and the results from computational fluid dynamics simulations. Results show that by increasing the number of facets at an angle to wind flow and decreasing the size of the facets, the size of the body direct to wind flow can be minimized and wind resistance can be decreased.