Latest News & Insights

The UK National Wind Tunnel Facility (NWTF) recently marked an important milestone with the formal handover of Management Board Chair responsibilities from Professor Jonathan Morrison to Professor Bharath Ganapathisubramani. Board members and colleagues gathered to recognise Professor Morrison’s outstanding contribution during his tenure as Chair. Under his leadership,… read more

Professor Mahdi Azarpeyvand from the University of Bristol is leading a new outreach project aimed at strengthening connections across the UK’s aerospace research community and improving visibility of experimental research facilities that are not currently part of the NWTF. The project will involve visits to universities across the… read more

The National Wind Tunnel Facility’s 10ft x 5ft wind tunnel at Imperial College London has been used in research to test a new approach to designing safer, more resilient and more sustainable tall buildings. The research was led by Miguel Martínez Pañeda (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Arup),… read more

Loughborough University in partnership with LaVision, hosted the NWTF PIV Data Collection and Processing Workshop from 23–25 June. The workshop covered the theory and application of Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV), Particle Tracking Velocimetry (PTV) and 3D Lagrangian Particle Tracking (3D-LPT), with participants gaining hands-on experience in data collection… read more

On Friday 5 June, Dr Kevin Gouder, Professor Mike Graham, and partners from Ghent University met a high-level delegation at Imperial College London, including Lord Patrick Vallance (UK Minister for Science), Marc Lemaître (European Commission Director-General for Research and Innovation), and Isabell Poppelbaum (EU Deputy Ambassador to the… read more

Wind tunnel tests led by Cranfield University as part of the ICED-CRM project have been completed, examining the aerodynamic effects of leading edge and runback ice shapes on the NASA CRM high-lift model. The project brought together Airbus, Boeing, NASA, Cranfield University, and the European Transonic Wind Tunnel… read more

Understanding the development of wake from a rotating wheel can provide insight into the best method of controlling the flow to achieve minimal drag. This dataset from Loughborough University provides PIV measurements in a number of salient planes to show the development of the wake from a rotating… read more

The first group of NWTF delegates has visited the Cranfield led ICED CRM Test Programme at the European Transonic Wind Tunnel (ETW) in Cologne, with a second group scheduled to attend in mid-April. The visits have been organised as part of the UK project ICED CRM, a collaboration… read more

Access through the NWTF Researcher Mobility Scheme enabled Miguel Escudero Munoz, a joint PhD student at Cranfield University the Royal Military Academy, Belgium, to carry out advanced experimental research at City St George’s, University of London, using the Transonic Wind Tunnel. The study aimed to improve the experimental… read more

As urban air transportation advances, distributed propulsion is becoming inevitable, making propeller–wake interaction noise a critical challenge. A new metadata-rich experimental dataset from the University of Bristol captures high-quality acoustic interference effects of overlapping propellers in forward flight, supporting the development of quieter next-generation urban air mobility systems. The data… read more

Airbus hosted the NWTF workshop on Wind Tunnel Testing for Icing Conditions & Impact on Aircraft Performance, bringing together specialists from industry and academia to examine icing challenges, wind-tunnel capabilities, and future sector needs. Thank you to Paul White and the team at Airbus UK for their support… read more