What others say about us
One of the many practical applications of WindEEE is that it can help us understand more about vulnerability to turbulence from the level of a community to the level of individual buildings and structures, including high-rise towers, so that we can develop better design codes. This is especially important given the number of buildings being constructed right across the world, especially in coastal areas and/or growing mega-cities.
A key challenge is that traditional wind tunnels widely used today for science and testing applications from planes to cars, buildings and air quality applications create uni-directional, and constant speed air flows. They simply cannot reproduce the complex space and time variation of localised wind storms that we are seeing increasing today. Moreover, due to their size and geometry, traditional wind tunnels are also not capable of reproducing all scales of wind motions involved in wind energy and wind environment studies.
Some other features include sheared flows, varying wind speeds from left to right or top to bottom, and any configuration in between. It can also do gusting flows. [It is] the world’s first 3D wind chamber.
The hexagonal lab can reproduce tornadoes up to an Enhanced Fujita 4, the second-highest tornado classification. This is the first year the lab started fully operational testing, and Hangan already is getting results.