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Hurricane Simulator to Destroy Full Size Building
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. "
Does it run on Lin...
Dammit, you stole my line!
does it run Vista?
Yeah, but can it run... er... nevermind.
If you guys in Western Ontario want a hurricane so bad why don't you just come live here in Key West, Florida?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
10% idle
89.95% kernel (switching threads)
0.05% user (generating 70,000 "blow" commands per second)
Hurricanes may blow, but abusing thread-level concurrancy definitely sucks.
The disturbing thing is that this isn't the first Linux installation on a machine which is designed to destroy buildings..
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
I have doubts that you can accurately simulate a hurricane without the space around the house. Some damage is done directly by the wind, yes, but there's a LOT of damage that is done by the wind blowing things into other things and weakening them.
Do you randomly throw in pieces of tin roof and stop signs to simulate that? And trees? I doubt it, since there isn't enough space in your simulator for that.
As for being "perfectly repeatable", I have doubts for that as well. That assumes that you could build the exact same house over and over. The article even states that the placement of the nails in the house matters, and I can't see anyone being that perfect.
Overall, I think it's a neat project, but unlikely to really provide more insight than 'yeah, wind fscks shit up.'
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
...as if millions of nerds suddenly cried out, "yeah, but does it run...", and were suddenly silenced.
New form of Execution for when it's all televised.
I, for one, welcome our hurricane-simulating, house-destroying, Linux-running overlords.
Chums up, let's do this!
Yes but scientists have all ready been firing 2X4s directly into different structures in order to test this. Its a lot easier than trying to directly test the effects of wind.
Yeah. Its odd how some scientist can say a measurement can be perfectly repeatable when one of the major tenants of science is that there will always be variance. Perhaps what he meant is that the experiments will be repeatable within housing code because out in the real world the houses will be met with some variance in building quality.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Hurricane simulation in Canada, The Carolina Hurricanes in North Carolina winning the Stanley Cup, the world is coming to an end.
...is the source GPLed? It would be fun to add some random hacks, like simulating a pickup truck smashing through the roof, on this puppy.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Runs on Linux? RTLinux, then? Or some other RTOS? I'm just curious what people are using out there.
If you want to know what a hurricane does, study the effects of hurricanes. One of the best studies was done after Hurricane Andrew and the results were published in Fine Homebuilding Magazine.
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.
They're forgetting the most destructive part of a hurricane. Granted strong winds can and will do a significant amount of damage (I still remember what my parents house looked like after Ivan), but the most damage is done along the coastline where they get hit by storm surge. That's not something that can be replicated by a wind tunnel on a full scale. I drove along the southern Mississippi coast about 3 weeks ago. There is wind damage for miles inland, which I would expect, but it's nothing major. However the coastline is devastated. The first floors of buildings are completely washed out, destroying most of the buildings completely. The ones that were multi-story are collapsing in on themselves because their support is gone. Testing building construction in a simulator is a good place to start, but I hope it doesn't give people a false sense of security.
"As a result, there is great interest in making buildings safer and more resilient to the damaging effects of extreme weather."
Well the winds could potentially destroy the home, but the mold and rot that comes from the standing water could render it worthless.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
In a related News CompTIA warns governments against Linux: Runing Linux is proved to destroy Full sized buildings under various usage situations.
This proves that Linux can be used by Terorists, drug dealers that want to push competitors out and various other nefarious evildoer.
A member of CompTIA Steve B. indicated that Linux can even get chairs to fly around.
To paraphrase Dave Barry, "Everything should go well, provided the researchers remember to change the settings from 'Biblical Flood' to 'Hurricane'."
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
But seriously, how large can it scale before it gets tagged a WMD?
Linux destroys buildings (and drowns kittens and puppies, too) !
...if it was the Big Brother house.
My neighbors run a daily simulation. Just give me a 'ring and I'll have them over in no time.
House has stood up so far, but I'm living life on the edge, ya know?
"I, for one, welcome our hurricane-simulating, house-destroying, Linux-running overlords."
You mean Canadians?
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Awesome project, I think I might have heard about it on "Discovery" channel a while ago. (Or maybe a similar one.)
It's not every day that a house can be constructed just for the purpose of testing it with such strong winds.
I live in Nebraska, and I'm sure that some of the findings from projects like yours will find their way into our homes to protect them from tornadoes.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I figured I'd chime in here as a Western Engineering Student, who had Prof. Kopp last year, let you know what he was up to in the Fall. Kopp only taught the second half of my course because the first half of the year (during Hurricane season) he went to New Orleans to study the devistation.
This project isn't meant to make a perfectly hurricane resistant house (though, you could try based on the results). As far as I know, the aim is to find what little things can be done to the average house to improve the chances of survival for the house, or at least the people in it. In the example of nailing trusses to the walls of the house, anyone who's actually been there to see or nailed a truss can attest to how weak that connection can be, and one possible change is to mandate exactly how the trusses need to be nailed, and perhaps develop a new nailing plate to ensure that the placement of the nail is exact each time (if there is a steel plate on each truss with only one hole, you know where the nail is going).
Also, for anyone wondering "why Western Ontario?", UWO is home to a very well respected wintunnel lab, which has tested many very well known buildings (Athens Olympic Stadium, CN Tower, numerous tall buildings in China to name a few). You can take a look here: http://www.blwtl.uwo.ca/Public/Home.aspx
is that you designed a gigantic hair dryer that instead of an on/off switch uses a powerful and expensive computer? That is the kind of thinking we like at Microsoft! We need people like you! If you have no problem in waking up in the morning knowing that 50 milion people hate you and you share the same passion as we do, that is listening to the tormented screams and howls of our products' users, drop us a line or two. A glorious career awaits! We might even overlook that unhealthy linux thing you had ... allthrough we'd prefer if you turned out to be a sick, children molesting bastard instead.
now Airman can be done
anyone here know how to make a time stopping machine that does some sparkles in the process or at least some bubbles that rolls in the ground?
You don't need to run simulations yet. There are still plenty of real world data to collect before you can adequately simulate any hurricane. There are tens of thousands of buildings of every type here on the Gulf coast that can be assessed right now. Damage runs the full gamut, from light to catastrophic.
I live in a FEMA trailer. The western eyewall of Hurricane Katrina passed over my house. Various official guesstimates of wind velocity at the time were high Category 3 to low Category 4 - roughly 130mph or 210 kph. In my neighborhood, houses suffered everything from light roof damage from wind and felled trees, to complete destruction; nothing left but a pile of 2x4's. A few houses were swept away entirely, along with cars, boats and anything else that was not tied down.
My house is an ordinary 25 year old, rectangular, brick clad, single storey building with a simple hip roof and traditional construction. There are no hurricane straps anywhere in the house. The house structure survived just fine. Not a single window was broken, though most had water infiltrate between the panes. Roof damage was minor, it never sprung a leak, but it has been re-shingled since the storm. What put me into a trailer was the storm surge of 15 feet, over four feet of water in the house for several hours. The interior is still entirely gutted.
Between damage to the wiring, flooring, drywall, insulation, kitchen and bathroom cabinets, appliances, HVAC unit, furniture and all the rest of the contents of the house and garage, I'd just as soon build a brand new house from scratch. There would be a lot fewer headaches, and not much more expense.
So what's my point? It's simple. If you'll spend a few month in this area, you'll learn more about hurricane hazards than decades of laboratory simulations. There are too many parameters to get right before simulation results will yield much knowledge.
IANAE, but from my observation of damage from New Orleans to the Mississippi Gulf Coast there are several points to be made.
1) Straight line winds are just one hazard. The level of damage varies with wind direction, velocity and duration, amount of rainfall, height and velocity of storm surge, duration of inundation, distance from open water, barriers both natural and man-made, proximity and height of neighboring structures, and tornadoes (there were lots of those embedded in the storm). And maybe other factors too, including luck.
2) No doubt, building codes play a role in preventing or mitigating wind damage.
3) Those fancy, intricate gabled roofs that are so popular on all the new McMansions? They suck. I don't care how many metal brackets hold them together. They're mincemeat in a real storm.
4) You can't do much against flood. High Base Food elevation is the only thing that will prevent flooding. Build high to remain dry.
5) Most of the stuff you own is located below a line four feet above the floor. The cost of a house's structure is relatively small compared to its contents, equipment, and interior finish.
6) If you're in the storm's bull's eye, like Pearlington, Waveland and Bay St. Louis MS were, there's not much to be gained by expensive reinforcement of an ordinary house structure. You just can't fully protect against the massive energy that a Katrina-sized storm carries onshore.
7) Don't trust the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to protect you against anything.
8) Don't trust your insurance company.
9) When a hurricane's bearing down on you, don't worry about the house, get the hell out of town.
Spelt?
The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers
Easy, killer.
If I could mod up what you just said, I would. It was informed, informative, and appropriate.
I appologize if my previous comment was too abrasive. You just hit a nerve for me. I make a living doing research and experimental work; I know how much work goes into it and I know how it takes lots of "baby steps" to acheive the kind of results that people seem to expect from every single experiment. Mostly my beef is with the media's role in this process. Honest work tends to get publicized as something it isn't, and then people are all-too-ready to provide harsh criticism based on what was an impressionistic portrayal to begin with. This happens to an extreme degree on slashdot, where you have lots of people with generally no journalism experience, some technical experience, and who seem to all feel that they're qualified to pass judgement.
Your first comment hit this nerve for me, since your criticisms were all mostly irrelevant to what appears to be the actual task (it's research, or maybe even an undergraduate project, not the end-all solution to hurricane damage). The second comment was spot on relevant, though I still imagine that the people in question have done their homework, considered the basic concerns, and still have a pretty good reason to do what they're doing and expect that it will be in some way helpful.
If you want to compare the size of our professional/intellectual dicks, then we can do that, but I'll go ahead and admit that I'm a little wet behind the ears (though not so wet that I don't expect a little more respect than that). I hold in high regard the wisdom of engineers, technicians, machinists, and other "old goats"; I didn't get where I am today by being naive and ignoring what everyone else has to say. That is to say, I'm no troll. I am, however, critical and defensive of people who share my profession and receive (seemingly) uninformed/misinformed criticism.
m0nstr42.blogspot.com
Yes, but does it make coffee?
Firehed - Unfortunately, thanks to medical breakthroughs, common sense is not as common as it once was.
Straight line winds are just one hazard. The level of damage varies with wind direction, velocity and duration
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.
20 years ago, when I worked for CCL, I wrote a proposal for Building Research Establishment in Watford. The CCL-internal codename was "Big Bad Wolf", since the equipment was to simulate simulate wind loading on building materials by sucking and blowing until the materials fell apart. The BRE actuators look remarkably similar to those pictured, so far as can be seen.
So, is this an up-scaling of that project?
Computer-controller simulators? Bah. If you want to learn something about building hurricane-proof homes, take a trip to Bermuda instead.
Yes, spelt.
It's both tasty, and correct. (I eat a lot of stuff made with spelt flour, I'm told I have a wheat allergy.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
TFA discusses a meticulously built, meticulously inspected model home. Ha! Your real simulation needs to evaluate the effects on a house built by the usual motley crew of drug-addled, untrained, dunderheads who were probably herding sheep 3 weeks before they were hired at minimum wage by cheap-ass contractors to work on the house.
Flying debris aside (which punches huge holes in houses and allows wind to get inside), many homes destroyed by Andrew were found to have substandard construction, some with the roofs not even nailed to the frame of the house.
If you can make the house immune to flying debris (big heavy EXPENSIVE builtin window shutters), build the house well, and of course build it high enough above sea level, you can easily make a house hurricane-proof. Maybe it will add 20% to the cost of the house.
Making homebuilding idiot proof is a big topic right now, and if I wanted to go back and get my PhD, I'd study the role of construction defects in structural integrity. And I'd probably want to use the facility in TFA.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
point (9) should be point (1).
The absolute cheapest thing that can be done is improve the infrastructure around the city to allow rapid
evacuation in an emergency. (cheapest doesn't mean cheap though...)
In any event, every municipality should have some estimate of how long it will realistically take to evacuate and what resources are needed to do so. (for example, don't let the bus drivers leave town first, with an entire motor pool of school busses just sitting there because it's beneath your citizens to travel by school bus. Comfort should be the last priorty in a situation like that) And most importantly, bring those resources online before they are needed since when they are needed there will be too much panic to START a plan.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I'm amazed that an Ontario, Canada company developed this. It's not there's a lot of Hurricanes in Ontario.
I really have to ask. You North Americans, why the hell do you build your homes out of toothpicks?
g /_41805420_001842788_house_getty300.jpg
r y/full/Post-Tension-Rebar-Closeup.jpg ...reinforcing cinder blocks...r 15.jpg
e %20construction%20for%20web-716493.jpg
Look at the photo from the article:
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41805000/jp
Every hurricane or every news report about tornado alley showing the damaged homes looks like this. This looks like a pile of toothpicks! You really spend thousands of dollars to build and live in these wooden things?
I'm from the Bahamas. Although I'm the least patriotic person I know, I have to admit that our buildings hold up pretty damned good under hurricanes. A hell of a lot better that the photos we see coming out of florida. We build everything with CINDER BLOCKS reinforced with steel rods. They work, trust me.
I tried googling for some photos to illustrate but none of them show enough steel rods to be accurate.
And what is with you people and sheetrock walls? I've heard crooks in ft. lauderdale getting in through people's walls. Try breaking through cinder blocks. Actually I remember something from a guiness book of world records where a karate teacher and his young students totally demolished an entire home by just karate chopping everything. If a dozen 14yr olds can destroy a house built out of the same material as so many american homes, what the hell did you think a hurrican (or tornado) would do!?!
steel rebar...
http://www.caed.calpoly.edu/polycanyon/ncbs_galle
http://www.proptek.com/dbfiles/products/17/carrie
and held together with cement.
versus 2x4's, nails, and sheetrock!
I for one could not get a good nights sleep knowing my home is held up by this crap.
http://www.yournextbroker.com/uploaded_images/Hom
The BBC is reporting that the much vaunted Hurricane Simulator experiment in Ontario has surpassed expectations by not only destroying the test subject but also the building it was housed in. While some blame the catastrophe on the Big Bad Wolf, more reasoning minds have posited that "maybe they should have used more nails to hold it down".
No they don't. A flying elephant will do more damage .... or a flying rhinoceros.
Your points are valid. But so are the wind tunnel experiments.
The experiments can provide a lot of things that cannot be seen in the hurricane-damaged houses. They can monitor in real-time how the buildings get damaged. They can isolate wind damage from rain, debris, and flood damage. Most importantly, they can quickly test several different construction methods to see how well they fare against the winds. Does a nail at a 10 degree angle hold together against 50% more wind than a nail straight in? These are the kinds of things that can help improve housing codes and save a few people's homes.
No this won't help figure out how to prevent flood damage. (As you said, we already know the best way to do that.) But it will play a small part in helping people survive future hurricanes with their homes intact.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Linux, Sminux. I hate to spoil your fun but the simulator won't work--at least, if you really want to simulate the effect of a hurricane on the structure. The simulator may work for a light tornado, but most of the destructive force of the hurricane would be due to the momentum of the entrained water droplets, not the wind. At about 1/1000th the density of water, air would have about 10 times less force for the same velocity. Good Luck!
Jumanji!
Just build the homes out of concrete for Christ sake. It worked here, where over 95% of structures are concrete. There were only 3 deaths (which weren't even verified as directly related) and almost no structural damage among concrete structures (aside from windows without storm shutters) despite gusts approaching 200MPH. On the other hand, the majority of wood structures are gone. Yeah, concrete is more expensive, but not as expensive as building your home twice. They also happen to stand up very well in earthquakes too, which we tend to get every once in a while.
Not that they don't do stupid things here too.. the utility lines are all still above ground.
I hear there are a lot of out there who may have previous experience with this kind of thing
no sig = no personality(?)
...nevermind.
But seriously, in Soviet Russia, simulator blows you!
Libertas in infinitum
along with this great scheme to rip off my company by putting all the fractions of a cent from finance into my own special account!
This space for rent
Also, for anyone wondering "why Western Ontario?", UWO is home to a very well respected wintunnel lab, which has tested many very well known buildings...
Unfortunately, the "wintunnel" doesn't include hardware support for the buildings, and depends on Windows to supply such things as nails and sheetrocks.
(obligatory WTF? link.)
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.