Recent Development in Drones Icing

Dear Colleagues,

The use of unmanned aerial systems is exponentially growing in many different domain, both for civil and military applications. With their low cost, improved flexibility, and ease of use, they are the perfect tool for surveillance and monitoring, delivery, spraying, and many other applications. Their performance and autonomy are constantly improving with new technologies being brought to the market that further increase their potential. However, they are vulnerable to atmospheric conditions, especially icing, which greatly reduces their performances and autonomy. Since very limited power is available on these vehicles, traditional ice protection systems use for large aircrafts are not a suitable solution. Research on this topic is of great importance since high flexibility is one of the key advantages of UAVs.

The goal of this Special Issue is to present papers, whether original research articles or review papers, about recent developments in the study of drone icing. We encourage submissions that will enlighten the scientific community with the most recent advancements in atmospheric icing, experimentation, and ice protection systems, including but not limited to the following:

1) Atmospheric icing conditions, simulations, and forecasting;

2) Ice accumulation on fixed-wing and rotary-wing UAVs and methods for measuring ice layers;

3) Performance degradation due to icing;

4) Experimental facilities and state-of-the art setups;

5) Thermal and other active ice protection systems for wings and other parts of UAVs;

6) Development and application of nano technologies as passive ice protection systems;

7) Numerical simulation and prediction of ice accumulation and protection systems;

8) Onboard ice detection methods and anti-icing/de-icing control;

9) Design, modeling, simulation, and experimentation of new and unconventional configurations against icing;

10) Challenges of urban air mobility and delivery applications.

Dr. Eric Villeneuve
Dr. Richard Hann
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Drones is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
• aircraft icing
• aviation safety
• ice detection
• de-icing technologies weather resilience