Simulating tornado-like flows: the effect of the simulator’s geometry

Within the wind engineering community, a series of physical simulators of differing geometries have been used to investigate the flow-field of tornado-like vortices. This paper examines the influence that the geometry of a simulator can have on the generated flow field. Surface pressure and velocity data have been measured for two swirl ratios (S = 0.30 and S = 0.69) in two different simulators of different scale and varying geometry. The results of this research suggest that far from being a mature research field, there are still many unresolved questions that need to be addressed before data obtained from such simulators can be used with confidence in practice.