Blowing the house down

Pioneering Canadian research into wind effects on low-rise buildings will use novel wind simulators being developed by Cambridge Consultants.

A new University of Western Ontario research centre - known as ‘The Three Little Pigs’ facility – will, for the first time, permit the controlled application of realistic wind loads to full-scale houses and other low rise buildings.

The research is expected to lead to more formalised techniques for weather-proofing low-rise buildings which - unlike their high-rise counterparts - are ‘non engineered’ and tend to use vaguely-defined structures.

"No one has attempted real-world wind simulation on this scale before, so much of the instrumentation will be developed specially for the application", says Eric Wilkinson, head of Cambridge Consultants' Products and Systems Business Unit. "One of the key challenges is the creation of a custom control system architecture to handle the large number of interconnected wind simulators, and deliver the real-time performance required."