**1. Introduction**

The design of a Supersonic Wind Tunnel is complex, expensive and time consuming. One of the pre-requisites of such a facility is the availability of compressed air necessary to generate the required speed.

**Figure 1.** A Schematic of the arrangement of the Gas Dynamics Facility

© 2013 Ahmed; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2013 Ahmed; licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

In this Chapter, the design and construction of the basic gas dynamics facility (Fig. 1) is de‐ scribed first in Part I followed by that of a blow down type supersonic wind tunnel (Fig. 2) in Part II. The two facilities are currently in operation at the School of Mechanical and Man‐ ufacturing Engineering of the University of New South Wale.

**Figure 2.** A side view of the 5 ½ inch x 4 inch Supersonic Wind Tunnel
