Acknowledgements

The research reported in this booklet was not possible without the help of many persons, to whom the author is very grateful. During the first half of the 1990s, prof.ir. Jacob Wisse became more and more aware that a further study on driving rain was necessary, and possible due to the recent improvements in computers and CFD. He is acknowledged for the initiative of such a research at the university and I am very grateful for his wise advice and enthusiastic support during the course of my research. Profs. dr.ir. Klaas Kopinga and dr.ir. Martin de Wit are also thanked very much for their continuous advice and support. The latter was so kind to tolerate the noise which the wiper of the driving rain gauge in one of the windows of his office room (position P6, figure 3.6) produced. Dr. Hans Kuerten and prof.dr.ir. Jan Carmeliet kindly commented the manuscript of this thesis.

Thanks to the collaboration with dr. Mikkel Kragh (Technical University of Denmark) and dr. Anneli Högberg (Chalmers University of Technology), interesting ideas were exchanged and a full-scale comparison test of driving rain gauges from different countries was achieved. Since the end of 1998, Bert Blocken (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) enforced our international collaboration even more. In April 2000, Bert Blocken and I did driving rain tests in the Jules Vernes Wind Tunnel of the Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment (CSTB) in Nantes. This was made possible by the kind collaboration with the CSTB researchers Jean-Paul Flori, Philippe Delpech and Marc Dufresne De Virel.

I thank dr. Marcel Bottema, dr.ir. Chris Geurts, dr. Suresh Kumar and prof.dr. Ted Stathopoulos for their comments and discussions during different stages of the research. I thank the four students who brought the research forward. The first CFD calculations of wind around the Main Building of the TUE were performed by Ivo Baten for his master's thesis. Stan Bollen and Gert Eerdekens investigated the measurements and CFD calculations of driving rain at the VLIET building at their Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Kjell Bijsterbosch developed a driving rain gauge with a drop-counting device.

The facility services of the TUE and the facility management of the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning are acknowledged for allowing the full-scale measurements on the Main Building and Auditorium of the TUE and for realising a part of the measurement set-up. I thank Sip Overdijk, head of the laboratories of the Structural Engineering group of the Faculty, for allowing the use of their ultrasonic anemometer and PhyDAS for the wind measurements.

I thank the following persons for their technical support and aid (in random order): Wim van der Ven, Jan Vermeulen, Jos van Schijndel, Jan Diepens, Guus Theuws, Harrie Smulders and Wout van Bommel (laboratories of the Building Physics group), Marc Frencken (power supply for the driving rain wiper motor), Eric Wijen (Structural Engineering group), Stan van Asten (Building Production group), Nol Peeters, Henk Weel and Joep v.d. Weijden (Faculty's workshop), Ben Elfrink (Faculty's photographer), Tom Flesch, Arno Vervest, P. Peters and M. Theeuwes (University's electronic workshop).

Without making a long list of names, I thank the colleagues and the other staff members at the Building Physics group for support and interesting discussions, and finally all the other persons not mentioned who gave me advice, literature etc.

The research was a joint project of the Faculty of Architecture, Planning and Building and of the Faculty of Technical Physics, and was partly funded by the common TUE commission on ``Technology for Sustainable Development''.