Hurricane Simulator to Destroy Full Size Building 162
Anonymous Coward writes "This is a shameless plug, but I thought Slashdot readers might be interested in the hurricane simulator system the company I work for (Cambridge Consultants) helped develop for the University of Western Ontario. The BBC article is light on the kind of technical details Slashdot readers enjoy, so here are some titbits. The servomotors for the 100+ valves are controlled over an IPv4, gigabit Ethernet network connected to an Athlon dual-core AMD64 PC. The entire real-time control system runs on this machine, utilizing well above 90% of each processor core, and roughly 30% of the network capacity. The sampling frequency of the control system places a huge demand on the machine, with about 70,000 context switches taking place every second. Yes, it runs Linux. "
What about the hurricane? (Score:3, Interesting)
Real-time? (Score:1, Interesting)
This seems not good (Score:5, Interesting)
What they found that the building code was pretty good. There were a couple of issues.
The rain of an actual hurricane was responsible for a lot of the destroyed homes. Rain would get up under the shingles and soak the fiberboard sheathing. The sheathing would swell and the roofing staples would then cut into the sheathing and the sheathing would blow off. Once that happened, the house was toast.
Another issue was that builders didn't always build to code. They found a lot of nails that missed the lumber they were aimed at.
This experiment misses a couple of things that caused most of the destruction during Hurricane Andrew.
If you state what winds you want a house to withstand, you can reliably build the house to withstand those winds. I am skeptical that this experiment will turn up anything we didn't already know.
Re:Doubts... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Doubts... (Score:2, Interesting)
The point is, they're NOT going to be able to do a goddamn thing about flying debris (well, they could build all houses out of 10" of tempered steel), what they are trying to do is make houses designed to be as hurricane resistant as possible.
A cement brick house (standard in Florida) is able to stop any debris hurled at it by a hurricane. The standard test is usually a 2x4 at 120mph or somesuch. One weak spot is the connection between the roof and the wall. If these are not properly secured, the roof will be lifted up into the windstream, and you've seen the video of this happening. Protecing the openings of the house (windows, doors, etc) is important because of this same effect. As long as you protect your openings and your house was properly constructed, hurricanes are not a problem. And we have known how to build hurricane proof houses for a long time. People just like being cheap and want to know how much they can get away with.
This would be much more interesting.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yeah... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Simulations not needed. Yet. (Score:1, Interesting)
And on top of that, you can have the winds shift 180 degrees over the course of an hour without ever letting up. I didn't see anything in the article that suggested the simulator did or didn't account for that, but it's something that definitely happens.
I agree that while this sounds like an interesting experiment, it's very unlikely that we're going to learn anything that structural engineers don't already know. There are so many tropical storms that hit the southeastern U.S. that there is a lot of abstract scientific knowledge of the beasts, but more importantly a lot of practical hands-on knowledge in the construction industry regarding what works and what doesn't.
CCL + BRE - 20 years = Big Bad Wolf Project (Score:1, Interesting)
So, is this an up-scaling of that project?