Considerable amounts of water accumulate in aircraft fuel tanks due to condensation of vapor during flight or directly during fueling with contaminated kerosene. This can result in a misreading of the fuel meters. In certain aircraft types, ice blocks resulting from the low temperatures at high altitude flights or in winter time can even interfere with the nozzles of the fuel supply pipes from the tanks to the engines. Therefore, as part of the maintenance operations, water has to be drained in certain intervals ensuring that no remaining ice is present. In the absence of an established method for determining residual ice blocks inside, the aircraft operator has to wait long enough, in some cases too long, to start the draining procedure, leading potentially to an unnecessary long ground time. A promising technology to determine melting ice uses acoustic signals generated and emitted during ice melting. With acoustic emissions, mainly situated in the ultrasonic frequency range, a very high number of events can be recorded to characterize stress relaxation processes that occur during conversions from ice to water. In the present paper, in addition to the case of the fuel tank, the icing of a fuselage panel is also considered. The results obtained provide evidence that it is possible to determine the moment when all ice has melted. However, it is not possible to give exact figures on the amount of ice remaining or melted, which is not a limitation in practice.


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    Title :

    Monitoring Melting Ice Formations in Aircraft Fuel Tank by Acoustic Emission


    Additional title:

    Sae Technical Papers


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    International Conference on Icing of Aircraft, Engines, and Structures ; 2023



    Publication date :

    2023-06-15




    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Print


    Language :

    English




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