Testing activities continued in the CIRA Icing Wind Tunnel: two test campaigns for important international customers were successfully carried out from December 2019 to April 2020: an Indian government agency (GTRE) and a company from the Far East Asia.
The Gas Turbine Research Establishment (GTRE) is one of the Indian Government's Ministry of Defense Research and Development Organizations. Located in Bangalore, GTRE mainly deals with the development and design of turbine engines for military applications. On behalf of GTRE, the IWT performed, in December, the first module of a test campaign in icing conditions aimed at verifying the performance of the bleed-air ice protection system on a model representative of the inlet section of a turbine engine. This experimentation is part of a wider program of numerical/experimental simulation activities which also involved colleagues from the Computational Fluid Dynamics Lab.
This first part of the tests concerned a half-section of the model installed in the Secondary Test Section of the plant; instead, the subject of the second test module will be the complete section of the engine inlet and will be carried out in the Main Test Section of the IWT.
A major oriental company that has repeatedly entrusted CIRA with the execution of important experimental activities, has requested CIRA IWT to carry out a new test campaign in icing conditions with the aim to analyse the performance of the ice protection system of several components (wing, tail and nacelle) of a new aircraft. The test campaign, which engaged IWT from February to April, was made particularly challenging for the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic which, if on the one hand did not allow the customer to witness the tests (the customer has, however, granted its complete trust to the IWT team giving the opportunity to manage the tests and operate on its own equipment in complete autonomy), on the other hand it obliged the test team to implement specific operating instructions in order to perform the test activities in compliance with all the required safety conditions.
9 luglio 2020
