In-flight icing is a problem that aviation has grabbled with for more than a century. Various solutions addressing the problem and trying to solve its many facets exist today, but these are not suitable for all types of aircraft. With the emergence of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and the advent of the urban air mobility (UAM) industry it is evident that no cost-effective and viable solutions to in-flight icing exist. For low-Reynolds numbers, in-flight icing is a new research topic with many unanswered questions and the deeper we dig the more complex the problem seems. This talk will cover my own experiences trying to solve the in-flight problem for small UAS and how that search has evolved into a company focused on solving the entirety of this highly complex problem, with the help of world-renowned research scientists. I will cover the obstacles we faced in the beginning, including the work we did at NASA Ames, and the challenges we are facing now that we have what we believe to be a viable solution.
Biography
Kim Lynge Sorensen is one of the founders and the CEO of UBIQ Aerospace, a deep tech startup from Trondheim, Norway, that spun out of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Kim, originally from Copenhagen, Denmark, has an MSc. in electrical engineering with a special focus on robotics technology from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and Stanford, CA, US. In 2013 he was one of the first to enter the Ph.D. program at the Research Centre of Excellence the Autonomous Marine Operations and Systems (AMOS) at NTNU. Here he was part of the initial research group at the NTNU AMOS unmanned aircraft laboratory. His research topic was icing and icing protection for unmanned aircraft. In 2014 he joined NASA Ames Research Center as a visiting researcher continuing his work on protection solutions for unmanned aircraft from in-flight icing issues. He developed the first prototype of a novel solution in 2015 with NASA Ames researchers and in April that year, the first flight tests of any autonomous icing protection solution in the world were conducted in Alaska, with NASA and the US Airforce. In 2016 he was the lead author on a patent application on this technology. The same year he was rewarded with a Ph.D. in Aerospace Cybernetics from NTNU, and in 2017 he was part of a small group who founded UBIQ Aerospace, to be the commercial platform for the technology that today has the name D•ICE. In 2018, after 2 years as a Post-Doctoral fellow at NTNU AMOS, he officially joined UBIQ in the position he still holds as CEO.
