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In-flight icing is a hazard that continues to afflict the aviation industry despite all the research and efforts to mitigate the risks. The recurrence of these types of accidents has given renewed impetus to the development of advanced analytical predictive tools to study both the accretion of ice on aircraft components in flight, and the aerodynamic consequences of such ice accumulations. In this work, an in-depth analysis of the occurrence of in-flight icing accidents and incidents was conducted to identify high-risk flight conditions. To investigate these conditions more thoroughly, a computational fluid dynamics model of a representative airfoil was developed to recreate accidents that occurred in these flight conditions. The ice accumulations and resulting aerodynamic performance degradations of the airfoil were computed for a range of pitch angles and flight speeds. These simulations revealed substantial performance losses such as reduced maximum lift, and decreased stall angle.

Numerically predicted roughness distributions obtained in in-flight icing simulations with a beading model are used in a quasi-steady manner to compute ice shapes. This approach, called "Multishot," uses a number of steady flow and droplet solutions for computing short intervals (shots) of the total ice accretion time. The iced geometry, the grid, and the surface roughness distribution are updated after each shot, producing a better match with the unsteady ice accretion phenomena. Comparisons to multishot results with uniform roughness show that the evolution of the surface roughness distribution has a strong influence on the final ice shape. The ice horns that form are longer and thinner compared to constant roughness results. The constant roughness approach usually fails to capture the formation of the pressure side horns and under-predicts the thickness of the ice in this region.