Method of determining the effective surface area of a rigid body under wind disturbances

This work proposes a method for determining the effective surface area of a rigid body induced by the wind. The proposed method assumes a variable surface effective area on which the wind acts. To determine the effective surface parameter, the dependence of normal vectors and the position change of individual vertices of the solid body were used. Cardan angles and its derivatives were used to determine the rigid body orientation in space. The free motion of the rigid body was analysed for two variants: influence of wind force and forced motion. During calculations, various cases were analysed differing in terms of wind speed and direction. A comparison of the developed method with the constant and projected surface area was presented. Various acceptable cases in which the surface area approximation is permissible were also shown. The proposed method can be used to calculate the wind load acting on a load of transport devices.