ianbullock

Heat exchanger ice detection

This was a year long Clinic project at Harvey Mudd College done for Honeywell Aerospace. Honeywell is a leading manufacturer of environmental control systems for modern aircraft. The heat exchangers used in the environmental control systems are prone to icing issues which reduce overall system efficiency. The industry standard method for detecting ice buildup uses a change in pressure across the heat exchanger, but this method is only able to detect severe icing conditions.

During the course of our project, we investigated several novel ice detection methods and also constructed the liquid nitrogen cooled wind tunnel pictured above to simulate in-flight icing conditions.

RGB LED control	Real time wireless control of RGB LED lights for ambient room lighting.
Tidal turbine	Generating small amounts of electricity from water motion.
Ice detection	Novel sensing methods for ice buildup on aircraft heat exchangers.
Polyphonic synth	FPGA and PIC microcontroller based polyphonic MIDI synthesizer.
CCD readout	Low noise analog amplification and digital processing of the signal from an astronomical CCD sensor.
Courtyard chess	Large scale courtyard chess set.