Ice accretion on an airplane’s surfaces in flight may cause sensors failures or block mobile aerodynamic devices, in addition to decrease the aerodynamic performance of the aircraft. Anti-icing systems, designed to prevent ice formation, and de-icing systems, which remove already accreted ice, are mounted on airplanes to fight this ice accretion. Nevertheless, de-icing causes a new threat to the safety of the aircraft by generating ice debris that can impact the aircraft components or be ingested by the engines. It is thus necessary during the design phase of an aircraft to be able to estimate the trajectory of the potential debris, in order to avoid placing a vital component, such as an engine, in an area highly subject to the passage of ice debris. The objective of this research project is to develop a numerical tool for 3D simulation of ice debris with spherical shapes and flat plates in a CFD flow. The major contribution in the implementation of this tool is the introduction of a dynamic moment model for the rotating flat plate, based on a 3D extrapolation of a two-dimensional model taken from the literature. A Lagrangian approach will be used to study the trajectories of ice debris. To achieve this, the determination of the aerodynamic forces on the debris at any location in the fluid domain will require an interpolation in the CFD solution and the determination of the orientation of the debris at each time step in the case of the plane plate. After validation against the literature for both types of debris, namely spherical and flat plates, the trajectory code will be applied in 3D aeronautical velocity fields to simulate ice paths around, in particular, a blended-wing-body airplane geometry. In the case of the flat plate, the focus will be on the comparison between the dynamic moment model developed and a pre-existing model from the literature to emphasize the best behavior obtained via the new model. The results around the blended-wingbody will be used to visualize in a cross plane near the rear of the aircraft the footprints of the trajectories of the debris, to prepare a future work on engine placement.
Keywords:
de-icing; ice shedding; 3D trajectories; aerodynamics; flat plate; dynamic moment