The Landscape

Before delving into the design, the NICHE team performed a thorough investigation of existing facilities around the world and their capabilities. This landscape analysis includes a number of facilities that either simulate one of these hazards at large scale or jointly simulate the two hazards, but at smaller scales, making it impossible to recreate the actual physics of mitigation measures and the full structural load path.

Some of these facilities have been used for experiments informing NICHE's design, creating a geographically distributed Physical Design Testbed (PDT). The team anticipates these facilities will continue to serve as partners where users may conduct initial smaller-scale tests, before moving to the full-scale NICHE facility (see User Journey).

With no experimental facility in the world currently capable of up to full-scale simulation of combined wind and wave processes impinging on real structures, NICHE (shown in green) would represent a major upgrade in the intensities and scales available for the study of wind and coastal processes independently, not to mention concurrently.

The capabilities can help researchers close major knowledge gaps regarding the combined impacts of wind, waves, and surge to assess coastal vulnerabilities and develop cost-effective mitigation solutions.

Overcoming the Limits of Scale

Small-scale testing is limited by similarity requirements (e.g., Froude, Reynolds, Mach, Weber, Euler, Strouhal, Cauchy numbers similitudes). NICHE importantly resolves incompatibility of all scaling factors.

Credit: Tile Tech Pavers

Froude (Fr) scaling is required to ensure dynamic similarity when evaluating wind-induced lift-off of ballasted rooftop pavers, since both aerodynamic uplift and gravitational resistance govern the behavior

Credit: Gelogia Team

Full-scale testing is essential for simulating coastal processes like sediment transport, though the issue for Re and Fr number scaling is not confined to sediment transport problems only

Credit: Wix

Understanding failure thresholds, sequences, and load redistribution is critical, but not possible for smaller scale specimens as critical details/connections along the load path cannot be faithfully replicated or must be overly simplified.