Wind Tunnel Hall
Specially designed facilities for experimental investigations of the aerodynamics of a wide range of objects, including sails, wings, cyclists, vehicles, flags, buildings, towers and roofs.
Our wind tunnel provides our staff and students with unique opportunities to commence with a wide range of innovative research and testing. The wind tunnel is also available for contract research. Find out more about the testing capabilities on the Wind Tunnel Hall website.
Major facility
Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel
The Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel – the largest and fastest of its kind in New Zealand – was constructed at the Newmarket Campus in 2015. Its test section is 20 m long, 3.6 m wide and 2.5 m high, and it has a top speed of 20 m/s. It is designed as a general purpose wind tunnel and has facilities for testing model buildings in wind engineering studies, the drag and power of cyclists on a special balance/dynamometer, and model vehicles on a moving belt ground plane. It may also be used for measuring the drag of bodies like traffic signs, and the loads and performance of wind turbines.
For Wind Engineering studies, its long test section enables the wind simulation to be controlled so that a range of scales from 1:100 to 1:600 can be used, and it can simulate the flow above smooth surfaces like water to rough surfaces like cities by suitable combinations of blocks, barriers and spires. Coupled with the 512-channel high frequency pressure system, and several sensitive high frequency force balances, it is a powerful facility for investigating loads, pressures and vibrations on models of buildings and other structures like stadium roofs.