Iowa State University has landed a four-year, $14-million grant to design a national testing facility that will simulate tornadoes and other windstorms, like the powerful derecho that carved a path of destruction across the state in 2020. Professor Partha Sarkar, interim chair of ISU’s Department of Aerospace Engineering, is heading up the project.
“It is just like a wind tunnel,” Sarkar says, “except it can produce winds that are common in the Midwest which are tornadoes and downbursts and gust fronts.” The grant will support replacing ISU’s current Tornado/Microburst Simulator which is nearly 20 years old. It was also designed by Sarkar. That simulator is housed in Howe Hall on the Ames campus and it’s used to research straight-line and rotating winds, aerodynamic testing, flow visualization and more.
“We have been doing this for many years here at Iowa State and have been using this for studying what kind of loads they produce in this kind of wind,” Sarkar says, “so that we can design structures, buildings that can stand up to it.” The new, larger simulator will be a one-twentieth scale model of the full-scale facility. It would have the capacity to generate 225 mile an hour winds, comparable to a rare EF-5 tornado. The current simulator can create winds roughly on a par with an EF-1 tornado at 80 miles an hour.
“This project will allow us to build a much bigger and much more powerful facility that will accommodate much bigger models,” Sarkar says. “It will help us to test a full-scale building, for example.” If the full-size facility is built, it would allow testing a full-scale house or larger scale models of buildings with large footprints, like retail buildings, shopping malls and hospitals. The grant is from the U.S. National Science Foundation.
(By Pat Powers, KQWC, Webster City)