SEASIDE Project: taking a step towards a more sustainible and improved mobility in European transportation

While Aviation has become an indispensable part of European transportation system, the very same system nowdays seems to have reached its full capacity and beging to limit mobility.

In addition, there is a demand for more people and goods to travel faster and farther, with fewer delays” as defined by the H2050 target to complete door-to-door journey within 4 hours for 90% of travellers.

In order to reach this ambitious goal, a key role is played by the existing small community airports across Europe: exploiting it and improving safety, comfort and operability of small aicrafts is one consistent solution to increase mobility.

In fact a crucial aspect is to expand as much as possible the safe operation landscape in all weather, focusing in icing conditions. As Aircraft De-Icing System is one of the most power demanding on-board system, the challenge is to overcome the limits related to this aspect in small aircrafts. Moreover it should be reminded that small aircrafts (SAT) are affected by limited space availability for system installation and that due to the low volume of this general aviation market sometimes is not easy to find the Systems supply chain ready to afford requirements coming from SAT OEMs at a relative low cost.

SEaSIDE Project aims at solving the above issues by developing an innovative compact and low cost “Hybrid Electro-Expulsive De-Icing System” for the Piaggio P180 aircraft. The project will analyze, design, develop, test in an Ice Wind Tunnel Test (IWT) and deliver to the Topic Manager a prototype of Hybrid (thermal and electro-expulsive) De-Icing system at a relatively low cost

As Protom is the project coordinator, thanks to its an extensive know-how in Aerospace structures & systems design & development, the whole consortium is made up of highly skilled partners: GKN,one of the world’s leading multi-technology tier 1 aerospace supplier, with 50 manufacturing locations in 15 countries, with a deep experience in designing and manufacturing innovative smart aerospace systems and components; Italsystem, an Italian company strongly involved in IT system implementation for civil and military avionic.

While the Partners aim at becoming one of the European supply chain reference for the small aircraft community, SEaSIDE Project is ment to have an important impact on the revitalization of the European supply chain dedicated to SAT community.