Physical Modelling of Tornado-Like Flow Field

The challenges in the field measurements of tornado flow field and its physical simulation in a laboratory environment are major obstructions in the advancement of scientific knowledge about tornados and their interaction with the ground structures. In this paper, we report on new research facilities at the University of Western Ontario in Canada that can physically simulate tornado-like vortex. Both facilities are geometrically similar but have more than an order of magnitude scale difference. Qualitative and quantitative results showed that both facilities can physically simulate tornado-like vortex. The results also show that the radial and tangential turbulent velocities have strong dependency on the swirl ratio when a transition from laminar to turbulent takes place in the vortex core. Further investigations are underway to study the scaling effects in terms of physical simulation of the tornado-like vortex flow in the two facilities.