Largest plasma wind tunnel

The largest plasma wind tunnel is the SCIROCCO facility, located at the Italian Aerospace Research Centre near Capua, Italy. Built between 1994 and 2001, and opened in 2002, SCIROCCO's 70-megawatt arc heater is capable of creating a 2-metre-wide jet of superheated plasma through the test chamber at speeds of up to Mach 12.

Plasma wind tunnels are used to reproduce the conditions experienced during hypersonic flight, particularly during atmospheric reentry. The Scirocco wind tunnel can maintain a hypersonic jet of plasma for around 30 minutes at temperatures of up to 10,000 Kelvin. This allows test components and models (it accepts items up to 60-cm in size) to be put through the equivalent of a full re-entry process.

The Scirocco wind tunnel was initially proposed in the 1980s, and was originally intended to support the European Space Agency's Hermes spaceplane. Although that project was cancelled in 1992, it was decided to go ahead with the Scirocco tunnel, as it was deemed to be useful for other projects.