Surface Technologies for All-Electric Air Taxis
The trend towards the development of all-electric air taxis poses challenges in the areas of flight safety in a wide range of icing conditions, energy efficiency, performance, and noise emissions. The aim of SELECT is to develop advanced surface technologies for ice protection and drag reduction. The targeted subsystem is a passive ice protection system (IPS), which should deliver reliable performance over a representative range of icing conditions.
The functional surface technologies will be developed and targeted to the needs of the upcoming all-electric air taxis applications by enhancing simulation and design capabilities, developing surface materials tailored for low-power ice protection solutions, and enhancing testing capabilities for experiments and certification.
The role of AIT is to support the surface material development by providing computational analysis of appropriate inflight icing related phenomena, such as the aerofoil droplet collection efficiency results shown in Figure 1, and by improving surface material icing simulation capabilities where appropriate and possible.
Figure 1: Droplet collection efficiency calculation results for an aerofoil
Funded by the Federal Ministry for Climate Protection, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology (BMK) and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG).
