London, June 9 : A team of scientists and students from the University of Florida, US, has developed the world’s most powerful portable hurricane simulator, a giant machine capable of reproducing winds in excess of 193 kph (kilometers per hour) and recreating rain.
“We’ve harnessed 2,800 horse power, a locomotive’s worth of power, to recreate a wind field large enough to envelop part of a single family home,” Forrest Masters, the man in charge of the project, told BBC News.
He and his team have strapped together eight industrial sized fans and rigged them up to four marine diesel engines so powerful that they are hooked up to a 5,000-gallon
(19,000 litre) water tank just to keep the engines cooled.