Flight Testing the Indirect Ice Detection System in the Horizon 2020 Project SENS4ICE

Kurzfassung

From 2019 until 2023 the international Horizon 2020 project SENSors and certifiable hybrid architectures for safer aviation in ICing Environment (SENS4ICE) addressed the topic of aircraft icing and particularly supercooled large droplet (SLD) conditions. In the project a hybrid system design was developed and demonstrated in flight that combines multiple sensors to directly measure the icing conditions with an indirect approach. The indirect detection determines icing by analyzing change of the aircraft’s flight characteristic with ice accretion on the airframes. Combined, these technologies unite to the hybrid ice detection system, that are able to detect icing conditions as well as to discriminate between those conditions and give a more comprehensive view on the icing scenario. The paper gives insights in the setup of the project and focusses on the indirect ice detection as well as the conduction of two different icing flight test campaigns. In those campaigns the applicability of the hybrid ice detection system could be proven. Natural SLD encounters could be flown, data measured and the system behavior performance was checked.