Volcanic ash hazards to aviation safety

There is an insatiable demand for more efficient and powerful jet engines. However, jet engines are inherently vulnerable to contamination which can impede safe and efficient operation. Silicate ash is among one of the most harmful contaminants of jet engines. In aviation, natural ash particles in the atmosphere, whether volcanic or terrestrial (e.g., desert sand and dust) in origin, may present a critical hazard to jet engine safety. Here, we employed a protocol, developed for coal ash fusibility studies, to unify our understanding of contaminant deposition in turbines, by identifying a series of ash fusion characteristic temperatures, which describe fusion through the geometrical evolution of cylindrical ash compacts. This is the first scientific contribution in the fields of volcanology and aviation to permit the quantification of the complexity of the melting process of volcanic ash with variable composition, and the first to characterize the thermomechanical behavior of that to assess its sticking hazards against thermal barrier coatings.