Measurement of Aerodynamic Properties of Screens for Windbreak Fence using the Apparatus for Testing Screens

Recently, damage occurrence by wind erosion has been increasing in society. In times past, such problems only took place in desert area ; however, in recent years, the wind erosion problem is spreading out to agricultural land. Wind erosion in agricultural land can cause loss of loam soils, the disturbance of the photosynthesis of the crop fields and serious economic losses. To overcome the mentioned problems, installation of windbreak fence can be recommended which function as disturbing strong wind and wind erosion. However, there is still no proper guideline to install the windbreak fence and the installation used to rely on the intuition of the workers due to the lack of related studies. Therefore, this study measured the aerodynamic resistance of screens of the windbreak fence using the apparatus for testing screens. The apparatus for testing screens was designed to measure pressure loss around the screen. Measured pressure loss by wall friction compensated for pressure loss to calculate the aerodynamic resistance of screens. The result of pressure loss by regression analysis derived the aerodynamic coefficient of Darcy-Forchheimer equation and power law equation. The aerodynamic resistance was constant regardless of the overlapped shape when the screen was overlapped into several layers. Increasing the number of layers of the screen, internal resistance increased significantly more, and pressure loss caused by the screen also increased linearly when the wind speed was certain conditions, but permeability had no tendency. In the future, the results of this study will be applied to the computational fluid dynamics simulation. The simulation models will be also validated in advance by wind tunnel experiments. It will provide standard of a design for constructing windbreak fence.