Iowa State University has landed a four-year, 14-million dollar grant to design a national testing facility that will simulate tornadoes and other windstorms, like the powerful derecho that carved a path of destruction across the state in 2020. Professor Partha Sarkar, interim chair of I-S-U’s Department of Aerospace Engineering, is heading up the project.

The grant will support replacing I-S-U’s current Tornado/Microbust Simulator which is nearly 20 years old. It was also designed by Sarkar. That simulator is housed in Howe Hall on the Ames campus and it’s used to research straight-line and rotating winds, aerodynamic testing, flow visualization and more.

The new, larger simulator will be a one-twentieth scale model of the full-scale facility. It would have the capacity to generate 225 mile per hour winds, comparable to a rare E-F-5 tornado. The current simulator can create winds roughly on a par with an E-F-1 tornado at 80 miles an hour.

If the full-size facility is built, it would allow testing a full-scale house or larger scale models of buildings with large footprints, like retail buildings, shopping malls and hospitals. The grant is from the U.S. National Science Foundation.