India’s oldest Open Circuit Wind Tunnel at IISc will get an improve

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

OCWT is the oldest facility in India initiated within the Nineteen Fifties beneath the steering of Prof. O.G. Tietjens, and accomplished in 1959 beneath the chairmanship of Prof. Satish Dhawan. Inaugurated by Jaya Chamaraja Wadiyar, the then Maharaja of Mysore, the OCWT stays the biggest wind tunnel facility within the nation.

Over the many years, it has been instrumental in supporting a number of nationwide aerospace growth programmes in addition to non-aerospace research.

Based on the division, in 2025, the ability underwent a serious improve with help from TVS and IISc that concerned changing the legacy fan-motor drive system with a contemporary state-of-the-art system. This has elevated the utmost test-section velocity from 45m/s to 70m/s with extra exact velocity management and enhanced ranges of automation.

Over the previous 66 years, the OCWT has carried out greater than 370 check campaigns. The OCWT complicated is supplied with a devoted state-of-the-art Excessive-Efficiency Computing (HPC) Cluster. This technique was initially launched in 2018, with help from MDL, that includes 224 CPU cores distributed throughout eight nodes, every powered by Intel Xeon E5-2683 v3 processors.

“In December 2025, a further 1,280 CPU cores had been added throughout 5 new nodes, supported by RWRDC-HAL, utilising the newest AMD EPYC 9754 server processors. The brand new cluster will probably be used primarily to carry out CFD simulations for the HAL mission. We additionally utilise PARAM-Pravega at SERC, IISc for computations,” the division added.