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Hazardous atmospheric icing conditions occur at sub-zero temperatures when droplets come into contact with aircraft and freeze, degrading aircraft performance and handling, introducing bias into some of the vital measurements needed for aircraft operation (e.g., air speed). Nonetheless, government regulations allow certified aircraft to fly in limited icing environments. The capability of aircraft sensors to identify all hazardous icing environments is limited. To address the current challenges in aircraft icing detection and protection, we present herein a platform designed for in-flight testing of ice protection solutions and icing detection technologies. The recently developed Platform for Ice-accretion and Coatings Tests with Ultrasonic Readings (PICTUR) was evaluated using CFD simulations and installed on the National Research Council Canada (NRC) Convair-580 aircraft that has flown in icing conditions over North East USA, during February 2022.

The performance of low-adhesion surfaces in a realistic, in-flight icing environment with supercooled liquid droplets is evaluated using a NACA 0018 airfoil in the National Research Council of Canada Altitude Icing Wind Tunnel. This project was completed in collaboration with McGill University, the University of Toronto and the NRC Aerospace Manufacturing Technologies Centre in March 2022. Each collaborator used significantly different methods to produce low-adhesion surface treatments. The goal of the research program was to demonstrate if the low-adhesion surfaces reduced the energy required to de-ice or anti-ice an airfoil in an in-flight icing environment. Each collaborator had been developing their own low-adhesion surfaces, using bench tests in cold rooms and a spin rig in the wind tunnel to evaluate their performance. The most promising surface treatments were selected for testing on the airfoil.