The world’s largest and most advanced facility that allows performing both aerodynamic- and ice-type testing. The IWT is indeed the only facility that can reproduce simultaneously real altitude, temperature, humidity and velocity conditions that are encountered in flight.
The IWT is a closed circuit wind tunnel that allows reproducing on ground in a totally secure, controlled and repeatable environment, the real flight conditions inside a cloud. This involves the possibility of having ice accretion on various sensitive parts of the aircraft. Under several conditions, this ice accretion can be so severe to prevent the aircraft from continuing to sustain flight.
The IWT allows the simulation of all the main parameters of flight in clouds, such as:
1 Velocities equivalent to Mach numbers between 0.25 and 0.7,
2 Altitude in a range between 0 and 7000m,
3 Temperature ranging from –40°C to +35°C,
4 The possibility of controlling the humidity within an interval that, according to the conditions, can vary between 70% RH and 100% RH.
In addition, inside the tunnel it is possible to reproduce all the principal anti-icing and de-icing systems, such as:
1 Pneumatic boot
2 Electrical systems
3 Hot air systems
The IWT is equipped with three different test sections and an open jet configuration for a total of 4 different configurations in order to satisfy its customers, in terms of velocity, model dimensions, extension and uniformity of the clouds.
Finally, as a conventional subsonic tunnel, it allows to determine the aerodynamic properties of full scale parts of aircrafts or of reduced scale airmobiles, also thanks to the possibility to increase the Reynolds number exploiting the capability to pressurize the structure up to 1.45 bar.