New control strategies for wetting and icing in aeronautics – ICEWET

Flows controlled by moving contact lines are ubiquitous in nature and industry, with in particular many potential innovative applications in aeronautics (clean paint, windshields, icing, …). The objective of this project is to focus on wetting statics and dynamics in presence of vibrations or icing, in order to develop new substrates for aeronautics. For this purpose our multidisciplinary team combining chemists, experimentalists, theoreticists and numericists will work is close connection with the industrial partnair Airbus and will both adress fundamental aspects and innovative applications. The main scientific and technological challenges considered in this project can be listed as follows:

i) Identification by the industrial partner airbus of new emerging technologies from other industries (glasses, substrates, coating process…) of potential interest for aeronautical applications, in order to be considered in the project.

ii) Investigation of new anti-icing and deicing coatings by considering single biomimetic anti-ice coatings, super-hydrophobic and self-lubricating coatings, and grafting of anti-freeze proteins.

ii) Study, analysis and modelling of wetting dynamics for manipulated surfaces at small scale, combined with new experiments on drop solidification with model fluids in the lab (typically paraffin and gels of versatile properties),

(iii) Investigation of wetting and icing on new substrates (both elaborated during the project and resulting from emerging technologies) in a specific device able to reproduce frozen conditions in well controlled realistic conditions for both the ambient air, the drop and the substrate.

(iv) Control of wetting with or without solidification by acoustic waves or vibrating surfaces in order to study in detail the physical mechanisms involved and their potential application to aeronautical situations considered in this project.

(v) The related challenges posed by the modelling in close connexion with experiments of the effects of contact line at large scales taking into account substrate properties (texture, temperature, inclination, ..), ambient conditions (pressure, temperature, humidity), and the inertia and/or solidification at the contact line.

We propose an integrated experimental/theoretical/computational project to attack these problems in strong collaboration with Airbus. Briefly, an new experimental set-up with temperature, pressure and humidity control will be designed and used at IMFT for icing study on selected substrates. Those substrates will be selected by Airbus or designed by ITODYS. In parallel, well controlled experiments for moving contact line under solidification of subjected to acoustic waves will be conducted at MSC. Those experiments will be used for the validation of theoretical model developed at LMFA and integrated in numerical modeling (LFMA-IMFT).