An airborne icing characterization probe: nephelometer prototype

摘要

The aeronautical industry uses airborne probes to characterize icing conditions for flight certification purposes by counting and sizing cloud droplets. Existing probes have been developed for meteorologists in order to study cloud microphysics. They are used on specific aircraft, instrumented for this type of study, but are not adapted for an industrial flight test environment. The development by Airbus of a new probe giving a real time response for particle sizes between 10 and 500 mu m, adapted to operational requirements, is in progress. An optical principle by coherent shadowgraphy with a low coherency point source is used for the application. The size of the droplets is measured from their shadows on a CCD. A pulsed laser coupled to a fast camera freezes the movement. Usually, image processing rejects out-of-focus objects. Here, particles far from the focal plane can be sized because of the large depth of field due to the point source. The technique used increases the depth of field and the sampled volume is enough to build a histogram even for low droplet concentrations. Image processing is done in real time and results are provided to the flight test engineer. All data and images are recorded in order to allow on-ground complementary analysis if necessary. A non-telescopic prototype has been tested in a wind tunnel and in flight. The definitive probe being retractable is designed to be easily installed through a dummy window. Retracted, it will allow the aircraft to fly at VMO ( maximum operating limit speed).