Response to wind action of 265-m Mount Isa stack

Measurements were made of the response to wind action of the 265-m high, reinforced concrete stack at Mount Isa Mines in Queensland, Australia. Data were reduced from accelerometer, strain gage and pressure transducer records from four wind storms. Particular attention was paid to determining reference freestream wind speeds at stack height and wind structure, which involved using records from a number of anemometer sites and for which position errors were determined from topographical model studies in a boundary layer wind tunnel. In this paper, the full scale data are reduced and presented such that they can readily be used to compare with results from physical and mathematical model studies of stack response to wind action. Mean, standard deviation and peak tip displacements, and base overturning moment coefficients are given, along with estimates of structural damping, peak factors and dominant wake frequencies, at Reynolds numbers up to 2 x 10⁷.