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The applicability of FENSAP-ICE-Unsteady to solve ice accretion on rotating helicopter blades is investigated using a two-bladed rotor and a generic cylinder, to represent a fuselage, for a forward flight test case. The unsteady rime ice accretion is simulated by coupling, at each time step, flow and water drop equations to the Messinger icing model. Mesh displacement effects are taken into account by an Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian method. This new icing model is applied to rotor/fuselage flows by considering two grid domains: the first being fixed around the fuselage, and the second rotating with the blades. The gap region is stitched with tetrahedral elements to fully guarantee flow conservation.

Ice accretion is a purely unsteady phenomenon that is presently approximated by most icing codes using quasi-steady modeling. The accuracy of ice prediction is thus directly related to the prescribed time step, or the time span during which the impact of ice growth on both flow and droplets can be neglected. Such approximation is removed by FENSAP-ICE-Unsteady which fully couples in time a diphasic flow (interacting air and droplet particles) with ice accretion. The two-phase flow is solved using the Navier-Stokes and Eulerian droplet equations, while the water film characteristics and ice shape are obtained from the conservation of mass and energy within a thin film layer. The iced surface being constantly displaced in time, Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian terms are added to the governing equations to account for mesh movement. For rime ice, numerical results show that full unsteady modeling improves the accuracy of ice prediction when compared to one-shot ice accretion.