Ice accretion and aerodynamic effects on a multi-element airfoil under SLD icing conditions

The impingement behavior of large water droplets, their interactions with the solid wall and the subsequent ice accretion and aerodynamic effects have become a key issue in in-flight aircraft icing. In this study, ice accretion and aerodynamic effects on a multi-element airfoil were investigated under the recently introduced Appendix O icing envelope. Supercooled large droplet (SLD) dynamics were taken into account by employing a unified computational approach. Ice accretion was simulated using a partial differential equation (PDE) based solver, instead of the commonly used control volume method. The numerical solver of the SLD impingement was built on the droplet deformation and droplet-wall interaction splash models. The unified solvers for clean air, large droplet impingement, ice accretion, and the aerodynamic analysis of ice effects-all of which are based on a single unstructured upwind finite volume framework-were first validated using available experimental data and then applied to investigate ice accretion and the resulting aerodynamic effects on multi-element airfoils for various flight conditions and, in particular, near-freezing SLD icing conditions. Interestingly, two counter-intuitive results were found when comparing the ice accretion and associated aerodynamic degradation for non-SLD and SLD cases. Moreover, considering runback ice was shown to be essential in the design of an ice protection system (IPS) for the multi-element wing. (C) 2018 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.