Liebherr-Aerospace reports another milestone in the field of Electric Air Management Systems

Within the framework of the Joint Technology Initiative “Clean Sky”, Liebherr-Aerospace Toulouse SAS and Sonaca SA, Gosselies (Belgium), have recently achieved a major milestone in the development of a wing ice protection system that uses electric instead of pneumatic energy. The companies had the thermal performances of the electric ice protection system validated in both an anti-icing and a de-icing mode under defined icing conditions. The tests were carried out at the NASA Icing Re-search Tunnel (IRT), in Cleveland, Ohio (USA). The functionality of the control principle of the system was also tested and validated. The next validation step will be a flight test with an electrical wing ice protection system demonstrator on an Airbus A320 test platform in 2015. This test is meant to evaluate the robustness of both the control and the power consumption of the system in the different flight phases.