NASA Testing Aims at Supercooled Large Droplet Aviation Safety

Automatically curated summary from NASA.

According to NASA, researchers at the Glenn Research Center's Icing Research Tunnel are conducting tests to address supercooled large droplet icing, a rare aviation hazard. This phenomenon occurs when aircraft encounter liquid water droplets up to 2,000 microns in diameter that freeze rapidly upon impact, including areas behind conventional ice protection systems. NASA is using brand-new drop-sizing probes to measure particle size distributions and improve experimental cloud calibration. Detailed analysis of the collected test data remains ongoing as part of NASA's Subsonic Flight Demonstrator project, with results to be shared with the aerospace community.

Context and limitations

The findings reflect initial ground-based tunnel testing; detailed data analysis is still ongoing and has not yet been fully evaluated or published.