ESI Project Leader:Megan J. Cordill

ESI Team Members: Stanislav Zak

UniWien Team Members: Jiamin Chin, Amirhossein Jalali Kandeloos

AIIS: Thomas Neubauer, Reinhard Puffing

Rail Tec Arsenal Fahrzeugversuchanlage GmbH:Ingeborg Bednar, Benjamin Lanner

Villinger GmbH: Ira Villinger, Markus Villinger

IceBreaker project’s successful Icing Wind Tunnel campaign

The last two weeks in January, the team members from the FFG Take Off project IceBreaker spent testing the developed icephobic coatings under real icing conditions in an icing wind tunnel (IWT). For the past two years, the team has been developing robust icephobic polymer-based coatings made from less toxic materials that could be applied to airplane wings to help improve ice shedding in combination with internal heating systems. This research aims to contribute to a safe and sustainable future of aviation. The novelty of the coatings made at UniWien and further tested at the Erich Schmid Institute of Materials Science (ESI-ÖAW) is the surface structure made of slippery omniphobic covalently attached liquid-like surfaces (SOCALs)  – which can be best described as tiny brushes (approximately 5 nm in length) – that decrease the ability of water/ice droplets to adhere to the surface. A NACA 0012 airfoil wing section  mock-up fitting in the customized RTA jig was built by partner Villinger GmbH . It was built with sectional  removeable leading edge caps to allow changing between reference and coated surfaces efficiently. The electro thermal leading edge de-ice system  was also implemented and controlled by Villinger. The IWT campaign was performed at Rail Tec Arsenal (RTA) and icing runs were organized by the Austrian Institute for Icing Sciences (AIIS). RTA provided the necessary icing conditions, almost on demand, as well as extra warm clothes for entering the tunnel in between icing runs when the tunnel was a cold as -20°C. AIIS setup their innovative imaging systems to watch the ice accumulation on the upper and lower sides of the wing and to document the ice shedding in real time (check out the video). Before shedding the accumulated ice, 3D scans were made to further study how ice forms due to different icing conditions. More than 40 experiments were done during the 5 icing days on reference and two coatings. In the end, a side-by-side experiment with a simulated one-hour flight through icing conditions was successfully performed. The new coatings performed well and decreased the ice shedding time by about 10 seconds (approximately 20% improvement) compared to no coating. Next steps for IceBreaker are characterizing the tested coatings and planning an ice-adhesion test campaign using a centrifuge to further study how ice adheres to surfaces.

This project is funded by the granting organization (Bundesministerium für Klimaschutz, Umwelt, Energie, Mobilität, Innovation und Technologie) and the FFG (www.ffg.at). The FFG is the central national funding agency and strengthens Austria’s innovative capacity.