The confined tornado flow configuration has been developed at the Solar Research Facilities Unit, Weizmann Institute of Science, as a means for protection of the window of a solar reactor from contact with incandescent solid particles in gas suspension in the reactor cavity. The results of a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of a tornado flow confined in a simplified reaction chamber are compared in this paper with information about such a flow obtained by gas dynamics experimentation. All the information obtained by experiment was corroborated by CFD. Moreover, the CFD simulation brought to view some important unexpected features of the confined tornado flow, which are discussed in detail. (c) 2007 International Association for Hydrogen Energy. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.