SWERF: The future home of wind-engineering field research
The Smart Wind Engineering Research Field Laboratory (SWERF) is currently being developed on a fifty-acre site in Central Illinois with the equipment and resources to house the next generation of full-scale wind engineering research.
Extreme Wind Climatology Characterization
Piecing together accurate extreme wind time histories at all locations within the United States and around the world
ASCE IRD: Infrastructure Resilience to Windstorms
The ability to recover after natural hazards is vital to the existence of communities. Recovery of infrastructure from the February 28, 2017 Naplate, IL tornado was characterized by the UIUC group with a number of damage assessments.
NOAA VORTEX-SE: Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes EXperiment-Southeast
The Wind Engineering Group is working in collaboration with researchers from the University of North Carolina at Asheville and the University of Georgia to characterize the interaction between windstorm damage, the natural environment, and the built environment through post-storm damage surveys and simulation.
NSF EAGER: Quantifying Uncertainty in Crowd Response for Reliable Wind Hazard and Damage Assessment
The primary focus of this EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award is to study “human-sensor” data collected through Amazon Mechanical Turk– a crowd sourcing application.
The Wind Engineering Lab is working on a collaborative research project with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago to determine the influence of architectural form on the response of tall buildings under the action of wind.
Transient Wind Loading: Characterization of wind loading during transient wind events
In this project we are investigating the effects of transient winds on building pressures considering the different characteristics of transient events, such as rapid changes in wind speed and direction, and a significant vertical speed.
Tree-Fall Model: Characterization of tornadoes through post-storm image analysis
The pattern of tree-fall directions, debris fields, and crop damage are being used to model the wind speed and behavior of the vortex.