Photo courtesy of Hui Hu/Iowa State University AMES, IA — Wind turbine blades spinning through cold, wet conditions can collect ice nearly a foot thick on the yard-wide tips of their blades. That disrupts blade aerodynamics. That disrupts the balance of the entire turbine. And that can disrupt energy production by up to 80 percent, according to a recently published field study led by Hui Hu, Iowa State University's (ISU's) Martin C. Jischke Professor in Aerospace Engineering and director of the university's Aircraft Icing Physics and Anti-/De-icing Technology Laboratory. Hu has been doing laboratory studies of turbine-blade icing for about 10 years, including performing experiments in the unique ISU Icing Research Tunnel. Much of that work has been supported by grants from the Iowa Energy Center and the National Science Foundation.