LOM-Ice

Proving aircraft safe operation in icing and snow conditions is required by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) to comply with the Certification Specifications. Icing wind tunnel tests represent one of the most important means of compliance in this respect. Icing and snow conditions are generated in icing wind tunnels by injecting water particles (liquid droplets or iced particles) in the airflow. Major challenges in testing Supercooled Large Droplet and snow conditions impose the needs for a detailed characterization and monitoring of the injected particle clouds. This is especially important for snow conditions, for which wind tunnel cloud generation technologies are still under development.

In this perspective, it is crucial to reliably measure many cloud features (e.g., particle size, shape, velocity, concentration, and others). Moreover, the quantities must be measured in wide spatial and time ranges to prove uniformity and reproducibility of the conditions.

The main goal of LOM-Ice is to develop a laser optical measurement technique for the quantitative characterization of icing conditions reproduced in wind tunnels. A measurement technique that is both non-intrusive, capable of sampling wide spatial regions, and measuring a large set of cloud features, will be provided as a support for wind tunnel calibration and certification tests. The technique will enable the detailed and cost-effective analysis of particle clouds injected into an airflow. The efforts will focus primarily on snow conditions, since this is the research topic least covered. In fact, the proposed measurement technique is highly needed for bridging the current technological and modelling gaps in snow testing. Ultimately, this will enhance the competitiveness of Austrian RTOs in the field of icing and snow testing and simulation.