Slashdot Mirror
Giant Lab Replicates Category 3 Hurricanes
Pickens writes "The WSJ reports that a new $40 million research center built by the Institute for Business & Home Safety in Richburg, SC features a massive test chamber as tall as a six-story building that can hold nine 2,300-square-foot homes on a turntable where they can be subjected to tornado-strength winds generated by 105 giant fans to simulate a Category 3 hurricane. The goal is to improve building codes and maintenance practices in disaster-prone regions even though each large hurricane simulation costs about $100,000. The new IBHS lab will be the first to replicate hurricanes with winds channeling water through homes and ripping off roofs, doors and windows. The new facility will give insurers the ability to carefully videotape what happens as powerful winds blow over structures instead of relying on wind data from universities or computer simulations. The center will also be used to test commercial buildings, agriculture structures, tractor-trailers, wind turbines, and airplanes."
Tornado Strength? I think that's rather more than the Category 3 hurricane!
Now, if they would just test homes made out of straw, sticks, and bricks and see if in fact, a straw house can be reinforced to withstand big bad wolf strength winds.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Nothing new here. When I was a kid I had a program that would simulate fires, tornadoes, air and boat crashes, earthquakes, nuclear disasters, and even Godzilla, for far less than $100,000 a pop.
Sucks or blows, whatever, as long as there's swallowing that's all that matters.
I am very confused with the replies I read here (see above).
My first thought when I heard about this was: Awesome! In big capital letters.
I am a fan of overpowered machines that dwarf anything else... and this is just really really big, and it was built with the sole purpose to destroy things... It's a really cool toy!
However, the average slashdotter seem to find quite a few things wrong with this... or they just make a joke about it (+1 for jokes).
Is there something wrong with me? Am I alone?
If they wanted to see what the effect of a class 3 hurricane, they should come to my house and look at my kids rooms. Some people already think I was simulating an F5 tornado.
I asked someone from Environment Canada what the difference between an F4 and F5 tornado was, his answer was "an F4 destroys everything, an F5 destroys everything and cleans up after itself". Given those parameters, it sounds like your kids are only simulating an F4. ;)
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
we just had a tornado in my part of NYC last month and only the trees fell down. all the homes are made of brick and concrete and all survived intact even though the tornado passed right over us.
How much cheaper, really? Let's take the example of having modular prefabbed floors & exterior walls that are available in many configurations so you have design freedom to build what you like. These prefabbed sections can be mass produced, cheaply, and the right combination shipped to the location. Once there, you flip it up, use whatever connection method is needed for the walls and lay down the interlocking floor sections. The prefab sections I saw near Munich even had insulation built into them.
With wood, the wood has to be processed, granted at a much lower cost than the concrete section fabbing. Then it has to be shipped just like the prefabbed. But then it changes - The amount of labour that goes in to laying floor joists, laying & fastening floor sheets (which all results in a boing-ey floor anyway), framing wall sections on the floor then raising them, then ultimately installing insulation and poly, is quite a lot more than I imagine an efficient prefab production line would be.
Note that I have no actual idea of the relative costs of anythign above, but i'm genuinely curious as i'm sure that an efficient prefab system could turn out cheaper, or at least on-par. Then you get the benefit of stronger houses. Oh and there's nothing to stop you doing the internal framing with wood/metal studs, so you still get the freedom to change/customise the internal layout.
I do agree, however, that pure brick or poured concrete buildings would be more expensive. I also agree that *right now* it would be more expensive as an efficient prefab infrastucture would need to be built up over time. With the "PROFIT NOW, NOT LATER!!!" mentality of businesses over here, this is not likely to ever happen.
Actually the real issue that property insurance companies are concerned about is rising ocean levels. If you look at a map, much of the insured property is fairly close to a coast. Rising water levels will increase the frequency and severity of damage from floods and wind-driven water. Some insurance companies have stopped writing insurance in flood-prone areas and it's even going to get worse.
So yes, global warming is a real concern to insurance companies--as they are used to looking out many years on the risk premiums.
(FYI, unless specifically purchased, most property insurance does not cover flood damage, but only damage from wind-driven water.)
I always wonder this. Even in non-hurricane zones, houses in Europe (England & Germany is all I know about) are made of brick or poured/prefabbed concrete.
In England at least, this has a lot to do with the first building codes brought in after the Great Fire Of London in 1666 . The codes specified non-flammable building materials, eg brick or stone.
To this day, almost all (if not all) houses are brick built, including the suburban tracts that would look familiar to Americans. AFAIK pre-fab concrete was a big thing in the 1950s-60s, mostly for government-built 'council houses' and especially tower blocks (what a USian might call a 'project'). This method fell out of favour in the UK after a pre-fab concrete tower block partially collapsed after a gas explosion in 1968: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronan_Point
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It's not that much quicker. A good framing crew can put the whole house up in a few days. It's weird when you're monitoring a job. The sitework seems to take forever and it doesn't look like that much is going on. Then the framing starts and in a couple days there's this big wooden house that appeared out of nowhere. And you think damn, this thing is like 80% done, we'll be finished in no time. Then all of the interior build-out starts, and it takes months and feels like it'll never end.
Also framing tends to be very mistake tolerant. If the designer or the builder did something wrong, it's generally not a big deal to tear it out and rebuild it better. All of the framing works together to provide strength to the house, so temporarily removing any single stud/joist/section of wall/whatever usually won't result in collapse, as there's plenty of redundancy in the structure.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
The wooden frame house I'm living in now was built in the early 50's and has survived three hurricanes and several tropical storms. It creaked and groaned a bit, ok a lot, during Ike in 2008 but didn't suffer any damage. Not so much as a broken window. IIRC my neighborhood had sustained winds in 90mph range with recorded gusts up around 110mph. The house endured that beating for good four hours while the massive storm passed over.
Wood is much stronger than most people realize. The softwoods commonly used in home construction are also quite flexible and can deflect a lot before failing in a structural situation. When a wood frame house suffers a structural failure it's often somewhat graceful and the structure retains some of strength and doesn't just collapse on the people inside. A brick or concrete structure will hold up well until it hits a breaking point, then failure is complete and often catastrophic. Also concrete is ugly, I'd hate living in a concrete house.
Cheers,
Josh
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
Correct. When you look at a wood structure failing (like in the video), you do not see wood being ripped apart or anything like that. What you see is that big structures are separated from each other. The structures remain intact (at least until they fly into something else). The problem is how the structures are fastened to each other (ie wall to floor and roof). Strapping the roof to the walls with metal instead of just using nails makes a big difference.