4. Conclusion

As part of aircraft certification for icing conditions, in-flight tests are carried out to prove that the various de-icing systems are correctly sized and operate correctly. The aircraft used for these tests is fitted with measuring instruments designed to measure the water content and median volume diameter of the cloud conditions encountered.

Two families of instruments are currently used systematically, an airborne laser granulometer (of the CDP type) and a hot-wire sensor (such as the LWC 200 or WCM-2000). These instruments can explore water contents of up to several grams per cubic meter, and document the dimensional spectrum of drops between 2 and 50 μm. This information is currently sufficient to comply with current regulations.

These instruments, particularly the airborne laser granulometers, were developed for atmospheric physics...