We were recently invited to join researchers in the College of Engineering and Computing at the University of South Carolina as they complete an important project testing the performance of shingles in high wind conditions.

“Hi, my name is Sreehari Rajan, and I’m a graduate student at the University of South Carolina. I’m working with Dr. Michael Sutton, and we are doing a wind tunnel experiment on 3 tab shingles at 60mph, 90mph and finally 150mph wind speed to see how the shingles perform at these high wind loads. First, we’ll be doing a test at 60mph for 10 minutes and we’ll be recording the images of the shingles using a stereo visual system and we’ll be analyzing the images using Correlated Solutions’ VIC-3D software. After that, we will run the experiment at 90 mph and again at 150mph.

VIC-3D software will be used to analyze the speckle images and you can see that we have a natural speckle pattern on the shingles themselves because of the contrast you get from the minerals on the top of the shingles. VIC-3D helps us analyze by measuring the out-of-plane displacement, and we can get a full-field deformation of the shingles which can be really useful in understanding the performance under high stress.”