Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Proceedings of the
Conference on Engineering Research, Innovation and Education 2011
CERIE 2011, 11-13 January 2011, Sylhet, Bangladesh
An airplane wing ice detector has been designed and found to have some extra advantages over many
commercially available snow/ice detectors on airplane wings. The system has been tested extensively and
has proved to be accurate and reliable. A new type of graphite sensor has been designed which is self-
cleaning, very low power, easily mountable and replaceable. This graphite sensor is implemented in the
system to detect the presence of ice and measure ice thickness accurately. A comparative discussion of this
system with some of the commercial systems will be presented in this paper. A novel technique using DSP-
based real-time application of the system will be discussed in this paper. This paper discusses about better
safety to both modern military and commercial aircrafts and the advancements of the future technology.
Key words: Sensor; DSP; Real-Time Application; Differential Amplifier, Threshold Detection
*
Corresponding Author: Shuza Binzaid, PhD,
E-mail: shuza00@yahoo.com
actual thickness of ice detected on the sensor. The 3. BASIC PRINCIPALES OF THE
system requires calibration only once at amplifier SENSOR
stages during initial setup of DSP for signal capture
and thus digital conversion of ice-thickness that The sensor unit uses two probes that are electrically
becomes proportional to resistance of the sensor. conductive using a very low current ranging
As a part of calibration, the computer also between few micro amps only at low voltage. These
calculates the multiplier factors for sensor values. probes are non-corrosive by environmental effects
Figure 1 shows the block diagram of system setup. on the wing surface. The resistive medium at steady
state condition is considered as air. In this
condition, sensor read the resistance of air was
Ice and about 4 M. Figure 3 represents the equivalent
Temperature Signal Amplifier electrical circuit diagram for initial test setup of
Sensors on Wing Stages sensor. The resistance of the sensor drops to about
20 K, when probes conduct through water making
about 0.01-inch thick film.
6.5
2.5
Rprotection
1.5
-1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
V Rref Ice Thickness (Unit = 0.05 Inch)
Csensor
Cref Rsensor
Figure 5: Plot of data from the localized sensor
system shows voltage linearity with ice thickness.
Signal
Signal Differential
Differentia The threshold shift at amplifier output was from
Amplifier
Amplifier l Amplifier
Amplifier S
e
1.94 volts to 6.12 volts in localized sensor as
n expected. The detection of ice was done easily with
s this threshold variation. The linear curve shows the
DSP System Threshold o linearity of ice resistance with thickness. Then the
Detection r slope of the curve was determined from collected
data. With the amplifier and the sensor setup, the
experiment results showed that 12.267 mV of
threshold changed for every 0.01 inches of ice
Fig 4: A practical sensor and circuit system. thickness.
5. ADVANTAGES AND DIS- The electronic circuit was designed for sensor
ADVANTAGES signal amplification. A logical operation flow for
the system was implemented for ice detection and
There are a number of advantages of this sensor and deicing actions. Figure 6 represents the logical flow
circuit setup over some other sensors found on of the system operation.
aircraft. They are:
1. The design is very practical and sensor can be
easily placed on wing surface. Then the circuit
can be easily adjusted and calibrated for steady Start
state condition.
System
2. The system is associated with temperature
Initialize
sensing capabilities increase system accuracy to
determine presence of ice.
Wing
No
3. This sensor can be driven at high frequency with Surface Temp
a very low current rectification circuit. T<0 ?