3. Site and measurement set-up

In this chapter the site and instrumentation for the full-scale experiments are described. The objectives of the experiments are the following:

• development and testing of driving rain gauges. Driving rain gauges are not commercially available and no standard for their design does exist. Therefore several types of driving rain gauges were designed, tested and compared in practice.
• acquisition of driving rain data simultaneously with relevant weather data (in real circumstances, in full scale) for the development of models for driving rain and for studies on heat, air and moisture transport in building envelopes.
• verification of CFD simulations of wind and driving rain for the same situation.

The Main Building of the TUE was found to be a practical choice for the experiments, because of the following reasons:

• The Main Building is oriented north-south and has a large west façade. The prevailing direction for wind and rain is between south and west. Therefore the west façade is suited for driving rain measurements.
• There are no significant obstacles up to 400-500 m from the Main Building in south-west to westward direction. The fetch in this direction is rough and consists mainly of trees. Moreover, the Main Building is a large building (45 m high, 169 m wide, 20 m deep) and its height is much larger than $20 z_0$.
• A suitable location for reference measurements of wind and rain from the mentioned directions was found at the west side of the Main Building.
• Moreover, an ultrasonic anemometer on top of a mast placed west from the Main Building has been operational for reference wind measurements since April 1994. It was part of the measurement set-up of [Geurts 1997] and useful information on the wind characteristics on the site has been obtained.

• A meteorological station of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) is located at Eindhoven Airport (approximately 7.5 km westwards to the TUE site). The data of this station is useful for comparison with our data.
• During the measurements, the Building Physics group was situated at the two top floors of the Main Building. This and the general fact that the measurements are done at the university campus, facilitate the installation, accessibility and maintenance of the instruments. Moreover, the façade elements of the Main Building are easily removable, because the façade is a curtain wall, consisting of glass windows in frames of steel columns.

The following sections deal with the site, instrumentation and data processing. Details have already been reported in [van Mook 1998a] and [van Mook 1998b]. [Högberg et al. 1999] describe the full-scale comparison test of driving rain gauges at the west façade of the Main Building. For this test, the Chalmers University of Technology (CTH), the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and TUE compared driving rain gauges which they use.