Description
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is seeking information about the capability and availability of Icing Wind Tunnel (IWT) services and ancillary engineering support to assist with certifying an instrument that will be mounted to a NOAA aircraft. The purpose of this Request for Information (RFI) is to gather information on current capabilities of businesses within the market. The testing is required to determine the potential for ice accretion and shed, along with effective methods to prevent excessive ice buildup by deicing or anti-icing appropriate parts of the Trace Gas Inlet (TGI) pylon.
Key points to consider:
• The TGI pylon extends 345 mm in height above the fuselage skin and requires testing for ice accretion and shed.
• The testing should include varying several parameters to provide a range of test points, ideally to include Supercooled Large Droplets (SLD) greater than 50 μm in diameter.
• The tests would be run first with no heating to determine an accretion baseline, then run again as needed with various previously installed heaters cycled.
• The IWT vendor should be able to provide power for the heaters (nominally 115V, wattage and number of separate circuits TBD).