How Does the World's Largest Hurricane Simulator Work?

Wind tunnels are research tools developed to assist with studying the effects of air moving over or around solid objects. The fastest wind tunnels are called hypersonic wind tunnels and are designed to generate a hypersonic flow field in the working section. The speed of these tunnels vary from Mach 5 to 15.

The world's largest portable hurricane wind and rain simulator, a more complex weather simulator, has recently been unveiled by University of Florida wind engineers. In this case, portable doesn't mean you can carry it in your pocket, it just means it's mounted on a trailer.

The industrial giant is made up of eight 5-foot-tall industrial fans powered by four marine diesel engines that together produce 2,800 horsepower. This incredible power generates a lot of heat, so to cool these engines down, the trailer is followed by a 5,000-gallon tank aboard a truck that doubles as the simulator's tow vehicle.

Guess what it'll be used for? Of course, tearing down houses. Able to simulate complex wind patterns of up to 130 mph, this machine will blast uninhabited homes with the equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, including high-pressure water jets that mimic wind-driven torrential rain.

The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale is a scale classifying most Western Hemisphere tropical cyclones that exceed the intensities of "tropical depressions" and "tropical storms", and thereby become hurricanes. The categories into which the scale divides hurricanes are distinguished by the intensities of their respective sustained winds.

A category 3 hurricane is not the most powerful one in nature, but it can cause some structural damage to small residences and utility buildings, with a minor amount of curtainwall failures. Mobile homes are destroyed. Flooding near the coast destroys smaller structures with larger structures damaged by floating debris. Terrain may be flooded well inland.

Scientists will be using the hurricane simulator to learn more about exactly how hurricanes damage homes, and how to modify them to best prevent that damage. As an example, Hurricane Katrina was a Category 5 hurricane on this scale.