Queen’s researchers use carbon nanotubes for aircraft ice prevention

A team of researchers from Queen’s University in Belfast has developed a new system to prevent ice-build up on aircraft using carbon nanotubes (CNT).

The new technology is in keeping with the lightweight properties of composite aircraft and offers a weight saving alternative to the traditional methods used to prevent ice from forming on wings.

By producing an ultralight heater made from ‘webs’ based on the carbon nanotubes, the conventional de-icing system, based on bleeding hot air from a plane’s engine and onto the wing, is not necessary.

The use of an ice prevention system on aircraft is critical, as any ice that forms can increase drag and reduce lift, which can cause loss of control.

Professor Brian Falzon from the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Queen’s led the team to the discovery. “We started by creating a ‘CNT web’, where individual CNTs are aligned in the draw direction, and horizontally stacking 10-40 layers of the webs, at different orientations, to achieve the desired heating characteristics,” he explained.

“Each layer of CNT web can be as thin as 1/2000 the thickness of a human hair and the weight of a web large enough to cover a football field would be less than 30 sheets of A4 photocopy paper. These CNT webs were cured within a thin glass fibre laminate to provide structural support, and connected to a power supply.

“When we carried out testing, we discovered that the newly developed CNT heaters achieved rapid heating which shows that the CNT heaters could quickly de-ice aircraft and provide effective ice protection in flight.”

The team is developing further research on the system and it is hoped that it will be in use within a few years.

The research, which has been published in the journal, Carbon, is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and forms part of a larger research programme aimed at developing the aircraft structures of tomorrow.