¶ Wind Stress & Houses (2)
← Wind Stress & Houses (1) | Wind Stress & Houses (3) →
Index Entry
"data to cope with the greater wind speeds which they sometimes encounter.
"Looking for chances to take advantage of high tensile ability of the new sheet, I became interested in the effects of wind stresses on houses and discovered in wind tunnel tests that a cube and hemisphere of equal volume indicate a drag advantage of 10 to one in favor of the hemisphere, that is the drag is 10 times greater on the cube. That indicates that we might either cut down the size and weight of our original structural members in the hemisphere to maintain equivalent wind strength to that of the cube or we might take part of the increment and turn it to greater strength advantage. Thus we might build a hemisphere structure that could take enormous wind stresses many fold those which a cube of an equal weight of structural members could withstand.
“Another interesting discovery in the wind tunnel was that the heat losses were in direct proportion to the drag. It was indicated that you might be able to reduce your amount of heat necessary to heat the building, to a very high degree, by employing efficient aerodynamic shape. Shape factors are used very little”
