NASA - Preps Continue for Launching Engine Icing Research
NASA scientists are making progress in their preparations to mount a detailed
research campaign aimed at solving a modern-day aviation mystery involving the
unlikely combination of fire and ice inside a running jet engine.
The investigation deals with the seemingly strange notion that ice crystals
associated with warm-weather storms can be ingested into the core of a jet
engine, melt and then re-freeze, potentially causing the engine to lose power or
shut down altogether. Safety officials have documented more than 150 incidents
of this phenomenon since 1988. Most of the incidents have occurred in the
tropics.
“It doesn’t seem intuitive that ice can form in the core of a
warm engine,” said Ron Colantonio, manager of the Atmospheric Environment Safety
Technologies Project at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.
So in order to make sense of the mystery, NASA and its research partners are planning
to gather information by flying a specially-outfitted business jet in
high-altitude, warm-weather conditions suspected of having a large amount of ice
crystals.
Technicians in California are currently modifying a Gulfstream
G2 airplane to hold a suite of meteorological instruments, with hopes of having
everything ready for initial trial runs of the full setup in Florida this
August.
The research team then will take the lessons learned from their
trial runs, make appropriate changes and prepare for the primary campaign, which
is now targeted between January and March, 2013. These flights will take place
over Darwin, Australia, an area known for having the type of storms that include
high levels of ice crystals.
Meanwhile, another set of investigators will be preparing the ground segment of the research, which involves simulating
the engine icing conditions in an engine test facility at Glenn, as well as
refining new computer codes to help predict where and when the engine icing
conditions exist.
