Width Ratio On The Wind Load of a Building
Engineering SciFair Projects

The abstract, about building sructures engineering-science-fair-projects begins here...

PROCEDURES

I) Build Structures
A. Buy a plywood board that is 30in by 121in.
B. Cut four pieces of board so they are 5 inches by 4 inches then glue and nail the boards together so that one of the faces of the board has an area of 20 inches2.
C. Put your 16 wheels on the 16 axle pegs.
D. Drill a hole in the board that is big enough for the axle peg to go in but small enough so that the peg doesn’t come out easily. Put wood glue around the axle peg’s end so that it will stay inside the hole.
E. Clamp down on two sides with your clamp.
F. Screw a metal hook into the front of the structure.
G. Cut twelve more pieces of wood that have four 4 by 5, four 2 by10, and four10 by 2. Repeat step one with all.
II) Move wind tunnel if needed.
A. If you need to take wind tunnel into a quiet room with no people in it but you and a supervisor.
III) Start your experiment.
B. Put your structures in the wind tunnel one at a time and let the wind blow on them for two minuets every ten seconds write down how many newtons are pushing on the structure.
C. After you do this for six times with every structure go to each amount of time being a multiple of thirty except zero and find the average newtons of each structure in the multiples of thirty going to one-hundred-twenty.

RESULTS

The original purpose of this experiment was to determine the effect of height to width ratio on the wind load of a building.

The results of the experiment when my structure had a surface of about 20 inches2 having wind blow on my structures for 10 minuets and me recording how many newtons were pulling on the spring scale on my first structure at

CONCLUSION

My hypothesis was that as the height to width ratio increased, the wind load (drag) would increase.

The results indicate that this hypothesis should be rejected because my results were mixed. My hypothesis said that when the height to width ratio increased so would the wind drag. On my first two structures that was correct. On my last two however it was the exact opposite of that. On my last two structures it was the smaller the height to width ratio the more drag the building had on the wind.

After thinking about the results of this experiment, I wonder if it matters with other objects such as a car or a plane.

If I were to conduct this project again I would do the experiment with more trials than I had this. 3rd party contributor