The SENS4ICE EU project - SENSors and certifiable hybrid architectures for safer aviation in ICing Environment

Abstract

Modern airplanes are well equipped to cope with most common icing conditions. However, some conditions consisting of supercooled large droplets (SLD) have been the cause of severe accidents over the last three decades. It became obvious that there are certain types of airplanes which are not robust against these conditions as ice can form on unprotected areas of the lifting surfaces leading to loss of control. Consequently, authorities addressed these safety concerns by issuing new certification rules under Appendix O (FAR part 25/ CS-25) to ensure that future airplanes remain controllable in these conditions and can exit safely upon detection. Hence, the key to increasing overall aviation icing safety is the early and reliable detection of icing conditions to allow the necessary actions to be taken by the flight crew. The EU project SENS4ICE (SENSors and certifiable hybrid architectures for safer aviation in ICing Environment, 2019 - 2022) directly addresses this need for reliable detection and discrimination of icing conditions. An intelligent way to cope with the complex problem of ice detection is the hybridization of different detection techniques. Direct sensing of atmospheric conditions and/or ice accretion on the airframe may be combined with indirect techniques in which the change of aircraft characteristics with ice accretion on the airframe is detected. SENS4ICE will address development, test, validation, and maturation of different detection principles, hybridization - in close cooperation with regulators to develop acceptable means of compliance - and the final airborne demonstration of technology capabilities in relevant natural icing conditions.