Finite volume based film flow and ice accretion models on aircraft wings

TL;DR

This paper introduces a finite volume-based 3D film flow model for ice accretion on aircraft wings, validated against experiments, showing good agreement and potential for practical icing simulations.

Contribution

A novel finite volume method for 3D film flow modeling on aircraft wings that simplifies calculations and integrates easily with existing solvers.

Findings

Good agreement with experimental ice shapes

Model effectively captures different icing conditions

Easy to couple with existing finite volume solvers

Abstract

The thin runback water films driven by the gas flow, the pressure gradient and the gravity on the iced aircraft surface are investigated in this paper. A three-dimensional film flow model based on Finite Volume Method (FVM) and the lubrication theory is proposed to describe the flow. The depth-averaged velocity of the film is stored in Cartesian coordinates to avoid the appearance of the metric tensors. The governing equations are discretized in the first layer structured grid cell which is selected as the grids for film flow. In order to verify this method, comparisons between numerical results and experimental results of ice shapes on NACA 0012 airfoil and GLC-305 swept wing are presented, both showing a good agreement for rime and glaze ice condition. Overall, this model shows great potential to model ice accretion reasonably under different icing conditions. Besides, the present method doesn't require analytic metric terms, and can be easily coupled to existing finite volume solvers for logically Cartesian meshes.