Facilities, Equipment, Capabilities - Bridge Aerodynamics Laboratory

Wind Tunnel Test Section

• Subsonic, open-jet wind tunnel with 6 ft. by 6 ft. test section.

• Small-scale smoke wind tunnel for flow visualization.

• Two-DOF (degrees of freedom), large-scale, active-turbulence generator (computer controlled).

• Three-DOF motor-driven sensor traverse system (8 ft. by 8 ft., computer-controlled).

• A three-component, high-frequency, dual force-balance system.

• Six-foot diameter, motor-driven turntable (computer-controlled).

• High-speed, pressure-scanning system.

• Two high-speed data acquisition systems for lab use (average 64 channels per system).

Aerodynamics Laboratory staff installing a model in the wind tunnel test section.

• Thermo-Systems Inc. (TSI) hot-wire and hot-film velocity sensors.

• Pitot-static velocity probes (various configurations) and stand-alone pressure transducers (various ranges).

• Thirteen non-contact laser transducers to measure displacement.

• One IBM Risc 6000 workstation.

• One Dell Precision 620 workstation (double xeon processors).

• Extensive bridge and highway structures model inventory.

• Bridge plan library.

• Unique wind engineering and bridge aerodynamics reference library.

• Extensive laboratory and field study data archives.

• Two parallel rigid test frames for model installation.

• Several office workstations and laptops for field data analysis.

• Several portable data acquisition systems.

• Numerous wind gauges, accelerometers, strain gauges, and other sensors.

Numerical modeling results from CFD studies involving laminar flow around bridge decks.

• Instrument design.

• Computer simulation and analysis.

• Structural analysis.

• Full-scale testing and analysis.

• Wind tunnel experiments (especially fit for bridge applications).

• Long-term monitoring of structural and wind conditions.

• Model design.

• Model fabrication.

• Instrument deployment.

• Applied computational fluid dynamics.

• Various advanced data collection approaches.