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Within the European Integrated Project NACRE (New Aircraft Concept REsearch) led by Airbus, a team of research centers and universities developed a multidisciplinary flying testbed called IEP (Innovative Evaluation Platform). Under the form of a dynamically scaled model of a future civil transport aircraft, its role is to assist engineers during the assessment of flight dynamics characteristics and noise reduction capabilities. After the feasibility study during which potential scientific and economical benefits of such new test facility have been identified, the team decided to design and manufacture the IEP. Because of the dual aspect of the system (it is a flying unmanned aerial vehicle and a test facility), an extensive requirement analysis has been carried out by the partners in order to identify the necessary operational modes and their associated navigation and control strategies.

The aim of this work is to develop a semi-empirical model for erosion phenomena under ice crystal condition, which is one of the major phenomena for ice crystal accretion. Such a model would be able to calculate the erosion rate caused by impinging ice crystals on accreted ice layer. This model is based on Finnie [1] and Bitter [2] [3] solid/solid collision theory which assumes that metal erosion due to sand impingement is driven by two phenomena: cutting wear and deformation wear. These two phenomena are strongly dependent on the particle density, velocity and shape, as well as on the surface physical properties such as Young modulus, Poisson ratio, surface yield strength and hardness. Moreover, cutting wear is mostly driven by tangential velocity and is more effective for ductile eroded body, whereas deformation wear is driven by normal velocity and is more effective for brittle eroded body.

Avionics systems distributed on AFDX networks are subject to stringent real-time constraints that require the system designer to have techniques and tools to guarantee the worst case traversal time of the network (WCTT) and thus ensure a correct global real-time behavior of the distributed applications/functions. The network calculus is an active research area based on the (min,+) algebra, that has been developed to compute such guaranteed bounds. There already exists several academics implementations but no up to date industrial implementation. To address this need, the PEGASE project gathers academics and industrial partners to provide a high quality, efficient and safe tool for the design of avionic networks using worst case performance guarantees. The PEGASE software is an up-to-date software in the sense that it integrates the latest results of the theories, in tight cooperation with academics researchers.

Icing is a major hazard for aviation safety. Over the last decades an additional risk has been identified when flying in clouds with high concentrations of ice-crystals where ice accretion may occur on warm parts of the engine core, resulting in engine incidents such as loss of engine thrust, strong vibrations, blade damage, or even the inability to restart engines. Performing physical engine tests in icing wind tunnels is extremely challenging, therefore, the need for numerical simulation tools able to accurately predict ICI (Ice Crystal Icing) is urgent and paramount for the aeronautics industry, especially regarding the development of new generation engines (UHBR = Ultra High Bypass Ratio, CROR = Counter rotating Open Rotor, ATP = Advanced Turboprop) for which analysis methods largely based on previous engines experience may be less and less applicable. The European research project MUSIC-haic has been conceived to fill this gap and has started in September 2018.

Critical control systems are often built as a combination of a control core with safety mechanisms allowing to recover from failures. For example a PID controller used with triplicated inputs. Typically those systems would be designed at the model level in a synchronous language like Lustre or Simulink, and their code automatically generated from those models. In previous SAE symposium, we addressed the formal analysis of such systems - focusing on the safety parts - using a combination of formal techniques, ie. k-induction and abstract interpretation. The approach developed here extends the analysis of the system to the control core. We present a new analysis framework combining the analysis of open-loop stable controller with those safety constructs. We introduce the basic analysis approaches: abstract interpretation synthesizing quadratic invariants and backward analysis based on quantifier elimination.

Recent aircraft incidents and accidents have highlighted the existence of icing cloud characteristics beyond the actual certification envelope defined by the JAR/FAR Appendix C, which accounts for an icing envelope comprising water droplets up to a diameter of 50 μm. The main concern is the presence of SLD (Supercooled Large Droplets), with droplet diameters well beyond 50 microns. In a previous European-funded project, EURICE, in-flight icing conditions and theoretical studies were performed to demonstrate the existence of SLD and to help characterize SLD clouds. Within the EXTICE project the problem of SLD simulation is addressed with both numerical and experimental tools is being addressed. In this paper the objectives and main achievements of the EXTICE project will be described.

The seventh European Framework Program (FP7) “Personal Plane” project (PPlane) aims at developing system ideas to enable personal air transport in the long term (2030 and beyond). Such a system will avoid the ever increasing congestion on European roads and offer an alternative to the current conventional transport system across Europe, in particular in those states that still have poor highway and railway networks. The preliminary assumption made in the PPlane project is that automatisms should be developed to enable a “regular Joe” to use a personal aircraft, in various weather conditions, without any command and control difficulties, using a “push button” navigation interface. An on-board automatic system will take care of the complex issues of integration into the airspace (other sky users, class of airspace, Special Use Airspace…), navigation and emergency management.

This paper describes the new analysis software for the contamination modelling and outgassing / vent analysis, which has been developed under ESTEC contract by HTS and ONERA. A major part of the software enhancements have been dedicated to the improvement of the algorithms describing the physical processes involved in outgassing and contamination of species in orbit conditions. However, this paper concentrates on additional aspects of the new software tool, which are of interest for space environment analysis software development in general and the thermal analysis community in particular: The use of commercial software packages for the generation of the discrete model geometry and result visualisation. The interfacing possibilities of the software tool with thermal analysis tools.

The in-flight ice accretion simulations are typically performed using a quasi-steady formulation through a multi-step approach. As the ice grows, the geometry changes, and an adaptation of the fluid volume mesh used by the airflow and droplet-trajectory solver is required. Re-meshing or mesh deformation are generally employed to do that. The geometries formed are often complex ice shapes increasing the difficulty of the re-meshing process, especially in three-dimensional simulations. Consequently, difficulties are encountered when trying to automate the process. Contrary to the usual body-fitted mesh approach, the use of immersed boundary methods (IBMs) allows solving, or greatly reducing, this problem by removing the mesh update, facilitating the global automation of the simulation. In the following paper, an approach to perform the airflow and droplet trajectory calculations for three-dimensional simulations is presented. This framework utilizes only immersed boundary methods.