In this video, we take you inside the atmospheric boundary layer wind tunnel at TU Eindhoven in the Netherlands, which officially opened in December 2017. Part of the university’s department of the built environment, the facility is designed to examine the effects of wind on buildings, traffic and other urban infrastructures. Bert Blocken, TU Eindhoven’s chair of building physics, demonstrates the facility with a model of Bahrain’s iconic World Trade Center, which has three wind turbines fixed between the two halves of the building along horizontal axes. An admirer of the building, Blocken explains how it could have generated even more electricity with a few design tweaks.
With a test section of 27 m and wind speeds up to 33 m/s, the facility will also be used by athletes and sports equipment manufacturers, particularly cyclists. A keen cyclist himself, Blocken has previously published a study on the advantage gained by cyclists of having a motorbike behind them.
