News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
The TTU Foundation will be purchasing nearly four acres of land and existing structures in Crossville to be used for both research and instruction and house a recently acquired, large low-speed wind tunnel.
President Phil Oldham said that a wind tunnel will allow students to do physical models of research compared to theoretical. He said the technology will greatly enhance research opportunities for several topics, like electric vehicles, for example.
“It’s a device where you can control the aerodynamics or the wind speeds and turbulence levels and those kinds of things,” Oldham said. “So if you’re designing a structure that you want to meet certain design specifications at those wind speeds, it gives you an opportunity to test that.”
Oldham said that the equipment is about 140 feet long and that no current facility on campus could house such an apparatus. He said the university estimated that it would be about 20 times more expensive to build this kind of facility itself compared to the $3.2 million purchase.
“You know for students, this gives them an opportunity to not only design something on paper or on the computer, but also to prototype it and test it out,” Oldham said. “To see if their assumptions remain valid or not, to see if they learn something new from the physical experiment as opposed to the theoretical experiment on the computer.”
Oldham said that they expect everything to fall into place within the next two to three months. He said that the process to purchase the building and property is far along now and should be completed within the next month or so. He said then it’s just a matter of relocating the wind tunnel from its current location in Wisconsin to Crossville.
Oldham said while it might seem strange to utilize something that’s 30 miles away from campus, it can also provide an opportunity to connect with the Crossville community and businesses there.
