Abstract Temperature control is an important limitation to further increase in geotechnical centrifuge power. Although vacuum pumps can reduce windage loss, they also negatively affect heat transfer performance. Therefore, in this study, we aim to accurately determine the rate at which windage loss decreases with pressure to help assess whether reducing pressure is beneficial to temperature control. A computational fluid dynamic method based on the multi-reference model and k–ω shear-stress transport turbulence model is used to simulate the ZJU400gt geotechnical centrifuge. The windage loss and temperature of ZJU400 at 0–150 gravity acceleration under normal pressure conditions are simulated. Compared with the experimental data, the error is