Lidar Maturation and Demonstration Activities in the Clean Aviation UP Wing Project

This paper presents the current maturation and demonstration activities of forward-looking Doppler lidar sensors that allow measuring gusts ahead of the aircraft such that this information can be used for gust load alleviation controllers. With a limited lead time of the order of 0.5 seconds, the load alleviation performance of such controllers can be drastically improved, enabling wings that are lighter or have higher aspect ratios. For such an application, the sensor shall provide valid measurements even in the absence of aerosols. This requirement eliminates some of the most mature wind lidar technologies (e.g. coherent detection based on Mie scattering) and yields the need for mature direct-detection Doppler wind lidar in the ultraviolet wavelengths as they are able to exploit the Rayleigh scattering mechanism directly from the molecules of the air. Significant developments and demonstrations of these sensor technologies are currently being performed in the European Clean Aviation project "Ultra-Performance Wing" and are summarized in the paper. Experimental validations will be performed in 2026 at an alpine weather research station (about 2,650 m altitude) and in flight tests.