Pedro Fernández-Cabán of the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering studies methods of quantifying the intensity of hurricane winds and how those winds affect a building’s structural integrity. He collaborates with teams that go into the community to capture what the wind field is doing at ground-level and then brings that knowledge to the lab and replicates it with building models in a wind tunnel.
It’s difficult to link damage to a structure to the wind field at the time of failure. During hurricanes, power often goes out, leaving weather stations not functioning, so not much information about what the wind field is doing near the ground is available. “That is a challenge we are working on right now… to better infer or predict what the wind field was, with regards to intensity, direction and turbulence, and then relate that to some of the observed damage that we see.”
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