Partha Sarkar
Iowa State University, IA·Engineering
Tornadoes, downbursts (sudden columns of air slamming down from a storm) and gust fronts (the leading edge of storm outflow) kill people and damage buildings across the United States every year. Unlike ordinary large-scale winds, these "non-synoptic" windstorms are short-lived, swirling or plunging, and hard to recreate in a laboratory.
- Fields
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
wind engineering
tornado
downburst
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2027
What they work on
- Design a national facility, NEWRITE, that can recreate tornado winds up to EF5 (225 mph) along with downbursts and gust fronts, so that structures can be tested at 1:10 to full scale.
- Build and test a 1:20-scale physical prototype of NEWRITE at Iowa State to guide decisions in the full-scale facility design.
- Develop a digital twin, a computer model of the facility, to help design the full-scale NEWRITE.
- Plan facility capabilities to measure wind loads, load paths and wind-borne debris impacts, and to link these measurements with computational mechanics for predicting structural damage.
- Plan for integrating wind-speed sensors, ground pressure sensors and radar data to improve ground-level detection of windstorms and warnings.
More about the research
Without realistic tests, engineers cannot fully understand how these winds and the debris they carry tear structures apart. The risk is expected to grow as cities expand and storms intensify.
Why it matters
A facility like NEWRITE could help engineers design homes, buildings and other infrastructure that better withstand tornadoes, downbursts and gust fronts. That could reduce deaths and economic losses in communities hit by these storms. Combining sensor data with radar could also support better ground-level storm detection and warnings.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Hyoungsu Park
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Engineering
Measure how tsunami-driven debris damming increases forces on the first-floor columns of elevated structures, using experiments in the large wave flume at the Oregon State University NHERI facility.
Julio Ramirez
Purdue University, IN·Engineering
Convene and support NHERI network governance, including the Council, Network Independent Advisory Committee and User Forum, and update the NHERI Science Plan that sets shared research priorities across earthquake, wind and coastal hazards.
Matthew Bandelt
New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJ·Engineering·Early-career
Quantify plastic hinge response, how bending zones absorb energy, of HPFRCC components under combined axial load and bending through physical experiments and detailed computer simulations.
The school
Iowa State University: 23 labs on PI Pages, $462M a year on research, 327 research doctorates a year.
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