Wind Research Climate at Texas Tech University — An Overview

Wind engineering research at Texas Tech University has been pursued since 1970, when a tornado struck the city of Lubbock, Texas. At this time, the Institute for Disaster Research (IDR) was formed. A significant amount of research has been performed under the banner of IDR, mainly in studying the effects of tornadoes and documenting the damage caused by tornadoes and hurricanes. In September 1988, the Wind Engineering Research Center (WERC) was established to coalesce existing wind engineering research and to promote university-wide multidisciplinary research. The Wind Engineering Research Field Laboratory (WERFL) was built as an integral part of WERC. This facility consists of a 49 m high meteorological tower, a rotatable 9 × 14 × 4 m test building, and a 3 × 3 × 2.5 m data acquisition room. Wind speed, wind direction and building surface pressure data are recorded at the WERFL. The other facilities of WERC are the tornado missile impact facility, which is capable of propelling a missile at high speed toward a target; the tow tank facility, where a full-scale structure can be tested for flow visualization and pressure measurements; the wind tunnel facility, where a geometrically-scaled model can he tested in a boundary-layer type flow; a wind engineering library, which houses more than 3000 technical papers, reports and documents describing world-wide wind engineering research and close to 5000 photographs of wind damage collected by Texas Tech personnel during 60 separate windstorm events. Multidisciplinary research at WERC is carried out by eleven faculty members, nine Ph.D. students, eleven M.S. students and sixteen undergraduate students belonging to various disciplines such as Civil, Mechanical, and Chemical Engineering, Atmospheric Science, Geosciences, and Computer Science. In addition, the research is supported by two research associates and four staff members. The wind research at Texas Tech is mainly supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and organizations like the Metal Building Manufacturers Association (MBMA), the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the National Committee on Property Insurance, and various other organizations. Research projects which are currently being pursued include: building resistance categorization for insurance industry; wind damage documentation; area averaging effects for MBMA; signal light structure vibration for TxDOT, revision of building code for Texas Department of Insurance, wind effects on vehicles for Chrysler and Ford, and revision of the ASCE 7 standard. In June 1989, NSF funded a project, Colorado State University/Texas Tech University Cooperative Program in Wind Engineering (CSU/TTU CPWE) for a five-year period with total funding of more than 2 million US dollars. This project has nine Co-PIs representing four academic disciplines, with Dr. Kishor C. Mehta as program director at Texas Tech and Dr. Robert N. Meroney as the program director at CSU. The CSU/TTU CPWE project permits research using physical modeling in a wind tunnel, full-scale field studies, and studies involving numerical simulation.