Huge Wind Machine To Simulate Category Three Hurricanes

Two days before the June 1 start of the 2007 hurricane season, University of Florida wind engineers unveiled the world’s largest portable hurricane wind and rain simulator. Mounted on a trailer, the industrial-sized behemoth is composed of eight 5-foot-tall industrial fans powered by four marine diesel engines that together produce 2,800 horsepower. To cool the engines, the system taps water from a 5,000-gallon tank aboard a truck that doubles as the simulator’s tow vehicle.

UF civil and coastal engineers plan to use the simulator to blast vacant homes with winds of up to 130 mph — Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale — and high-pressure water jets that mimic wind-driven torrential rain.

The goal: to learn more about exactly how hurricanes damage homes, and how to modify them to best prevent that damage.

(...)

At full power, the fans turn at about 1,800 revolutions per minute, producing wind speeds of about 100 mph. A custom-built duct reduces the space available for the air to flow through, ratcheting up the wind speeds to a potential 130 mph. Steering vanes allow the engineers to direct the air wherever they want it to blow.

Implanted in the vanes, the water jets can simulate the most extreme rainfall of up to 35 inches per hour, although 8 inches per hour is more typical, Masters said.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070531102336.htm

...we already have such devices. They're called wind tunnels. Please ring up NASA next time instead of wasting taxpayer dollars duplicating what we already have.

(Oh, by the way, I can already tell that this is for entertainment value because why else would you make it portable)?

...scalability. And our aero engineers seem to do a fine job with it.

Airplanes hulls are specifically designed to keep turbulence to minimal levels. Laminar flow scales pretty nicely, if you have it. Turbulence does not scale.

If you are studying a house, you're looking for turbulence effects like wind working its way under shingles, or under the eves. The places where the damage starts, and then accelerate rapidly. I don't think a scale model would capture those very well.

Also, by making this portable widget, they can easily take it around to real houses and test them one after the other. As opposed to hand-building models designed to be destroyed in a wind tunnel. I'm sure there are thousands of such houses available in New Orleans alone, sadly enough.

...which is testable both in CAD and in situ environments. I just don't believe that the structural engineers need a monsterous machine that looks like it will be used for entertainment in the coming years. Here is a picture of Langley's transonic wind tunnel, which no doubt would be adequate enough for turbulent flow structures such as scaled houses.



Incidentally, Phantom, I'm on your side. I just believe in better use of resources. (And yes I have to teach a watered down fluids course to pilots. Go ahead do it without the math....lol).

I exhausted my knowledge of the subject in post #5.
:dunce:

I love in-silica as much as the next software guy. I always worry about the map never being the same as the territory. That said, I wouldn't rule out the Mythbuster-Effect: engineers like to enjoy their destructo-machines whether it gets them closer to a result or not.
:evilgrin:

or retrofit requirements....

One can only hope.