Wall of Wind

The Wall of Wind (WoW) is a large scale wind engineering testing facility at Florida International University.

[2] Testing on the earlier Wall of Wind setups led to the design of screens for rooftop air conditioners that reduce wind pressure by up to 58 percent and which were adopted into Florida building codes.

[1] At a media preview of the upgraded Wall of Wind in 2012, a demonstration between roofs built under pre- and post-Andrew codes was conducted.

[1] In 2015, the National Science Foundation (NSF) selected the Wall of Wind as one of the nation's major "Experimental Facilities" under the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) competition.

[3] Because of the increasing wind speeds associated with storms such as Hurricane Dorian and the fact that the Wall of Wind cannot account for wave damage, FIU scientists in 2022 received a $12.8 million NSF grant to develop a new testing system known as National Full-Scale Testing Infrastructure for Community Hardening in Extreme Wind, Surge, and Wave Events (NICHE).