Understanding of Ice Accumulation and Accretion over an Airfoil

Abstract

Since the beginning of civil aviation, icing has been a severe weather hazard for aircraft operation. For many years, the term engine icing has been used to describe ice accreting on exposed engine surfaces as an aircraft flies through a cloud of super-cooled liquid droplets. The concern arising out of aircraft icing is due to its adverse effect on flight safety and hence, for decades, a considerable amount of research is on in the area of icing of aircraft and its components exposed to ice. Experimental verification and some of the key numerical investigations in the area have revealed that aerodynamic characteristics and controllability of an aircraft are affected by the amount and type of ice accretion at different locations. Fundamentally icing of airfoil of an aircraft contributes to decrease in lift force as well as the angle of stall on the wing. This also brings up another situation that is longitudinal instability of the apparatus concerned. It has been a complex physical situation to comprehend the accretion process and its impact. In the present study NACA0012 airfoil geometry has been used to understand the accumulation and accretion process through simulation. The results of total mass of ice accreted with respect to total time of accretion (tice) have been presented