By KURT LOFT
The Tampa Tribune

GAINESVILLE - It huffs and it puffs and nearly blows your house down.

That’s the job of a new hurricane simulator at the University of Florida, a 25-ton contraption that belched 120 mph wind and rain during its first official test run today. Called a “Category 3 storm on wheels,” the world’s largest portable wind simulator delivered its expected fury by slamming a mockup section of house with high-pressure storm forces.

“The auto industry uses crash-test dummies, but we crash-test houses,” said Forrest Masters, lead investigator on the project with the university’s College of Engineering.

Built during the past year for $500,000, the simulator looks like something from a sci-fi flick, with eight funky inlets that channel air to hydraulically driven fans, all powered by a quartet of marine engines. A 5,000-gallon tank supplies water to cool the engines and simulate a raging rain storm, which is directed by a series of swaying airfoil panels.

Pressure gauges, velocity meters, stress detectors and other devices all run to a central computer that records data and makes an evaluation. The engineering team can test more than 30 different wall mock-ups, made of various materials and windows-types, supplied by manufacturers of single-family homes.

“We’re creating dynamic loads on a structure,” Masters said. “Basically, we’re creating a hurricane in a lab setting.”

The point of the machine is to show weak points in the way a home is designed and built, and how products and materials perform under stress. The information than can go into forming better building codes, according to the Institute for Business and Home Safety, an industry advocacy group in Tampa.

But the simulator creates more than powerful wind and rain: It allows engineers to trace the path of water intrusion that can damage a home long after a storm has passed. The simulator’s high-pressure jets can mimic a torrential rain dumping 35 inches in an hour.

“Water intrusion always looks for the weakest link in a home,” said Wendy Rose, a spokeswoman for the institute.

Rain under pressure can find its way past doors, windows, soffits and cracks in most any structure, resulting in saturation of wood and insulation and even mold growth. This was the case with thousands of Florida homes after the hurricanes of 2004 and 2005, which sustained substantial water damage, according to the Florida Building Commission in Tallahassee.

“Our goal is to strengthen those faults through better building codes,” Masters said. “There are lots of good products on the market, but they’re not always assembled in a manner that makes them work well together in hurricanes.”