With 2007 declared the hurricane season, scientists are gearing up to find better ways to predict an approaching hurricane and how destructive they are, so that they can make the buildings in the hurricane-zones more hurricane-resistant.
Cuing with these lines, the engineers at the University of Florida have designed the world’s largest portable hurricane wind simulator. The stimulator is composed of eight 5-foot-tall industrial fans powered by four marine diesel engines.
Mounted on a trailer, the device can produce winds of up to 130 mph! This is equivalent of a category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale. True, there is nothing new in building a wind simulator. But, what catapults this new one to the headline is its being so powerful as well as portable at the same time. The steering vanes of the stimulator allow the engineers to direct the air wherever they want it to blow.
Being both portable and powerful, the machine would surely make easy for researchers to determine, how buildings fail during storms, with precision.
