India’s oldest Open Circuit Wind Tunnel at IISc gets an upgrade

The upgraded Open Circuit Wind Tunnel (OCWT) at the Department of Aerospace Engineering, IISc will be inaugurated on January 12.

OCWT is the oldest facility in India initiated in the 1950s under the guidance of Prof. O.G. Tietjens, and completed in 1959 under the chairmanship of Prof. Satish Dhawan. Inaugurated by Jaya Chamaraja Wadiyar, the then Maharaja of Mysore, the OCWT remains the largest wind tunnel facility in the country.

Over the decades, it has been instrumental in supporting several national aerospace development programmes as well as non-aerospace studies.

According to the department, in 2025, the facility underwent a major upgrade with support from TVS and IISc that involved replacing the legacy fan-motor drive system with a modern state-of-the-art system. This has increased the maximum test-section velocity from 45m/s to 70m/s with more precise speed control and enhanced levels of automation.

Over the past 66 years, the OCWT has conducted more than 370 test campaigns. The OCWT complex is equipped with a dedicated state-of-the-art High-Performance Computing (HPC) Cluster. This system was initially launched in 2018, with support from MDL, featuring 224 CPU cores distributed across eight nodes, each powered by Intel Xeon E5-2683 v3 processors.

“In December 2025, an additional 1,280 CPU cores were added across five new nodes, supported by RWRDC-HAL, utilising the latest AMD EPYC 9754 server processors. The new cluster will be used primarily to perform CFD simulations for the HAL project. We also utilise PARAM-Pravega at SERC, IISc for computations,” the department added.