The Wind Engineering Energy and Environment (WindEEE) Dome at Western University, Canada

Abstract

The WindEEE Dome at Western University (former University of Western Ontario), Canada is a novel three dimensional and time dependent wind testing chamber. It is conceived as a hexagonal chamber of 25 meters in diameter surrounded by a "return circuit" of the same hexagonal shape of 40 meters in diameter, see Figure 1. Its aim is to create a wide variety of wind systems that typical wind tunnels cannot produce (e.g. tornadoes, downburst, all kind of gusts and currents, shear winds and boundary layers, etc.) at large scales and Reynolds numbers. Figure 1 Schematic of the WindEEE Dome WindEEE does that by varying the configuration, wind speed and direction of 106 fans in the dome. 100 of them are situated on the peripheral walls of the inner testing chamber distributed as follows: 8 fans situated on 5 of the 6 sides of the dome and 60 fans arranged in a matrix of 15 fans per row x 4 rows on the 6 th wall. Each fan is 0.8 m in diameter and operates at approx. 25 m/s at a nominal power of 30kW. The other 6 fans are larger (2 m in diameter with nominal power of 220kW) and are situated above the testing chamber ceiling. These 6 fans produce inflow or in reverse outflow to/from a plenum that communicates with the hexagonal chamber below through a bell-mouth. WindEEE operates in two distinct modes: (i) multi-fan wind tunnel with the 60 fan wall (14 meters wide x 4 meters high) pushing air inside the chamber and with the air recirculating above the chamber. In this mode any type of spatial and/or time correlations may be produced. Each of the fans on the 60 fan wall can be individually operated and can accelerate over 50% or their nominal rpm in 1 second. This mode is assisted by two dropping screens that isolate the corners of the hexagon from the "wind tunnel" part, see Figure 2. (ii) axisymmetric mode in which 8 fans on each of the 6 walls are coupled with the larger 6 fans situated above the ceiling and that communicate with the lower testing chamber through a 5 meters diameter bell-mouth. In this mode WindEEE can produce for instance tornadoes (5 meters in diameter and translating at 2 m/s over 5 meters), see Figure 3a, or downbursts same size and translating, Figure 3b. The Wind Engineering Energy and Environment (WindEEE) Dome