Carbon nanotubes deliver lightweight de-icing for aircraft

Ice build-up on planes can impact wings, engines and propellers, negatively affecting drag and lift and potentially putting the aircraft in jeopardy. The research, which appears in the journal Carbon, describes how carbon nanotubes (CNT) were used to create a web that was embedded within a glass fibre laminate. When attached to a 4.9 kW m⁻² power supply, it was found that that heating performance of the material could remove accreted ice within 15 seconds.

“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,” said project lead Professor Brian Falzon, from Queen’s University’s School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. “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.