Fabrics form a still growing part of the built environment, providing engineers and architects alike with unique properties and possibilities like an exceptionally low self-weight, large freedom of shapes and very efficient structural behaviour.

A structural fabric is however a very complex material which is difficult to characterise and describe numerically. The existence of a wide array of different approaches in testing these materials, the way engineers derive their material parameters and the lack of any form of standardised code defining how these structures should be build make the design of tensile fabric structures an area which requires a great deal of expertise and experience.

Developing an in-depth understanding on how various decisions during the testing of this material influence the outcome and what these different outcomes mean to the practice of designing these structures has been the main focus of this research. By conducting various tests, deriving material parameters and applying these in various numerical models, the influence of various decisions has been established. A statistical methodology of dealing with a large variety of resulting material properties and deriving the least-favourable sets has been proposed and verified.

The generated insights and methodologies provided by this research thus contribute to a better understanding of the structure-material interactions in fabric structures and further pave the way towards a unified, international building code for these structures.

During the renovation and conversion of historical buildings, it is common practice to check strenght and stability of the structure according to the current standards, such as the Eurocodes. Based on the results is then decided how the existing structures will be treated, which in the majority of cases leads to a reinforcement of the structures, due to the great difference between the current, rather stringent, standards and the historically used calculation methods which were based upon experience.

Performing these structural reinforcements however is not always obvious, especially in the case of historical heritage. Based on previous research we allready know that for a large part of these historical structures the wind load forms the most important external load on the structure. This given, combined with the great unpredictability, and the associated safety margins, of this load, makes us ask ourselves how the loads imposed by the Eurocode relate to the reality and whether we cannot decrease these loads, in the case of historical structures, by conducting wind tunnel tests.

The research conducted during this master's thesis aimed at capturing the differences between the Eurocode at one hand and the reality at the other. By performing a series of wind tunnel tests on standard volumes, calculating the same geometries according to the Eurocode and comparing the results, an estimation could be made regarding the difference betwee, the standard and the practice.

Before beginning the tests, a literature study was conducted in order to understand the main principles and concepts of fluid dynamics, which are also present in the Eurocode. Here, attention was paid  to, inter alia, the fluid-object interaction, the scaling of a real life situation to a wind tunnel model and generating a physically correct atmospheric boundary layer.

Pressure measurements were then conducted on hemispherical domes, a geometry that is directly present in the Eurocode. By testing different dome diameters at different wind speeds, a complete picture of the magnitudes and distribution of the pressure coefficients on these geometries could be formed.

Comparing these results to the calculation according to the Eurocode, shows that, in realty, the absolute value for the pressure coefficients for hemispherical domes will be 40% lower than the value predicted by the Eurocode. In conclusion we could state that in the case of a renovation, conducting wind tunnel tests can form an important addition to the design process. After all, carrying out these tests, it becomes possible to reduce the external wind loads and costly structural interventions may be avoided.