Implementation and Evaluation of a Hail-Impact Simulation Device

Abstract

Hailstorms are hazardous for people and goods. Automatically collecting information on hailstorms will help climate researchers analyze them and generate models for forecasting. Reproducing hail impacts is a requisite for designing and calibrating an electronic hail sensor. In this article, the design of a device for hail-impact simulation is presented. This device is based on the theory of Energy Matching, which explains how steel balls can be used instead of hailstones in order to have equivalent impact energies. The posed device, which can perform up to fourteen impacts between loading instances, either by dropping balls one by one or in pairs, was constructed. The size of the balls can be between 0.5 cm and 3.0 cm. In this paper, which is an extension of the work originally presented at the URUCON2021 conference, the importance of having such a hail-impact simulation device is explained. The main contribution of this extended work is the presentation of an experiment performed as an application of the constructed device. This experiment has the objective of verifying the aiming repetitiveness, while also verifying the linear relation between impact and electric signal energies.

Keywords

• Hail-Impact Simulator
• Energy Matching
• Calibration
• Sensor
• Design