THIRUVANANTHAPURAM:Necessity, as the adage goes, is the mother of invention. The Satish Dhawan Wind Tunnel Complex which ISRO commissioned in Thiruvananthapuram on Monday is a true ‘Made in India’ story. The facility itself - comprising a wind tunnel and a shock tunnel - is fully ‘desi’ designed and developed, but several critical technologies that went into its making also had embargoes slapped on them.
Despite that, ISRO’s Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) in the state capital had succeeded in developing them with the aid of industries.
“VSSC designed the technologies which were vetted by the academia and experts and realised by the industry. The industry was fully involved,” K Sivan, director of VSSC, which houses the brand-new complex, said.
The sprawling complex is next only to similar facilities in the US and Russia in size and simulation capability. Among the indigenously developed technologies were alumina cored bricks which can resist repeated thermal shocks and extremely high temperatures of up to 1,550 Kelvin.
A second technology was the precipitated hardened stainless forgings that can withstand pressures of 1,000 bar. (One ‘bar’ is approximately equal to the atmospheric pressure you feel at sea level).
“We had to start from scratch. Even literature on them were not available. The raw materials were available, but we had to conduct hundreds of experiments to validate the technologies,” a senior officer associated with the project said.
Other indigenously designed and manufactured technologies include the ‘hot shut-off valve’ for withstanding high pressures of 130 bar with a new film-cooling technology. VSSC also developed a technology to minimise air temperature loss. A prime example of public-private partnership, the Satish Dhawan Wind Tunnel Complex saw the involvement of L&T and at least 20 other vendors in its development, an ISRO source said.
ISRO needs hypersonic wind tunnels for the aerothermodynamic modelling of its aerospace vehicles. Facilities already available in the country are inadequate for the space agency’s requirements as they test relatively lower Mach speeds.