Research Facilities

Test Section: 14ft x 9ft

Details: The Open Circuit Wind Tunnel (OCWT) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) is the largest wind tunnel facility in India, operational since 1959. It was conceived in the 1950s and completed in 1959 under the leadership of Prof. Satish Dhawan. The OCWT has played a crucial role in supporting various national aerospace development programs and has conducted over 370 test campaigns. In 2025, the OCWT underwent a significant upgrade, increasing the maximum test speed from 45 m/s to 70 m/s and enhancing automation and speed control. This upgrade is expected to support next-generation aerospace platforms and industrial research.

Test Section: 0.5m x 0.5m

Details: This wind tunnel is a low-turbulence, open-circuit suction type facility at IISc’s Low Speed Aerodynamics Laboratory. It features a settling chamber with bell-mouth entry, honeycomb, and four fine screens to straighten the flow, followed by a 14:1 contraction section for velocity uniformity. The square test section (500 mm × 500 mm × 3000 mm) has a slight divergence to offset boundary layer growth. Flow is driven by a 5 kW DC motor-controlled fan, with speed regulated to within ±1 rpm. The contraction zone after the settling chamber has a contraction ratio of 14:1 and is shaped to provide a smooth velocity increase and enhance flow homogeneity.

Test Section: 0.6m x 0.6m

Details: This wind tunnel at IISc is an open-circuit, low-speed facility with a test section of 0.6 m × 0.6 m × 2.7 m, capable of reaching 35 m/s airflow. It is powered by a refurbished 20‑HP Siemens induction motor with a variable-frequency drive, operating up to 1455 rpm. A newly installed 8-blade Clark‑Y profile fan with supporting accessories ensures smooth operation. For experiments, a machined aluminum flat plate with pressure transducers and adjustable support system is used to achieve controlled flow conditions.

No. of Cores: 1504

Details:  OCWT operates a state-of-the-art High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster boasting a formidable 1,280 processing cores. The architecture consists of a primary master node and four dedicated server nodes, with every node driven by dual 128-core AMD EPYC 9754 processors and 1TB of high-speed DDR5 memory. The master node acts as a central data hub equipped with massive enterprise SSD storage and hardware RAID, while high-speed Intel 10GbE adapters and a Dell EMC switch ensure seamless, low-latency communication across the entire array. Fully supported by redundant 1200W power supplies, this robust infrastructure delivers the immense computational muscle and reliability required for complex, data-intensive engineering simulations.