EDWARDSVILLE, Ill. – With Hurricane Milton expected to make landfall across the west coast of Florida Wednesday night, FOX 2 News meteorologist Haley Fitzpatrick visited Southern Illinois University’s Edwardsville campus, where they demonstrated the high wind profile—simulated hurricane force winds—in their own manufactured wind tunnel.

“What a wind tunnel is doing – it’s a simulated environment where you have high wind speeds, or airflow speeds, and it’s typically used if you’re investigating aircraft or automobiles, if you want to find out what’s the effect of that vehicle passing through the air,” Dr. Micheal Denn, mechanical mechatronics instructor at SIUE, said. “And you can do things like measure the lift or measure the drag of a vehicle.”

Originally constructed in 2000, this piece of equipment used for engineering lectures serves as a hands-on learning tool for SIUE students and illustrates principles of aerodynamics.

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“So, this has a test section, that’s the area where your model would go; and it’s 24 inches by 30 inches,” Dr. Denn said. “It’s powered by a 300-horsepower variable speed motor and that provides a range of airspeeds. Anywhere from very, very low up to the low 200 miles per hour range.”

What the tunnel demonstrates is that it doesn’t matter how big an object is, hurricane force winds of category 3 strength or higher can lift and level high density objects with ease.

“The last update I saw, the sustained winds in Hurricane Milton were 145 mph. And so, to put that in context, that’s like an EF-3 tornado. And so, we know from some of the research I’ve done, that if you have a tornado that’s that strong, it can throw things on the order of 150 pounds several thousand feet,” Dr. Alan Black, associate professor in SIUE’s Department of Geography and GIS, said.

“So, if you imagine something that’s several hundred pounds, that’s your refrigerator, your washer, those things can easily be picked up and thrown by the winds. And we know if the gusts in Milton are even stronger, which they presumably are, we have documented examples from tornadoes of railcars, we’re talking about something 35-40 tons, large steel eyebeams being moved.”

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