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This paper presents the current state of a three-layer surface icing model for ice crystal icing risk assessment in aircraft engines, being developed jointly by Ansys and Honeywell to account for possible heat transfer from inside an engine into the flow path where ice accretion occurs. The bottom layer of the proposed model represents a thin metal sheet as a substrate surface to conductively transfer heat from an engine-internal reservoir to the ice layer. The middle layer is accretion ice with a porous structure able to hold a certain amount of liquid water. A shallow water film layer on the top receives impinged ice crystals. A mass and energy balance calculation for the film determines ice accretion rate. Water wicking and recovery is introduced to transfer liquid water between film layer and porous ice accretion layer.

This paper studies the level of confidence and applicability of CFD simulations using steady-state Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) in predicting aerodynamic performance losses on swept-wings due to contamination with ice accreted in-flight. The wing geometry selected for the study is the 65%-scale Common Research Model (CRM65) main wing, for which NASA Glenn Research Center’s Icing Research Tunnel has generated experimental ice shapes for the inboard, mid-span, and outboard sections. The reproductions at various levels of fidelity from detailed 3D scans of these ice shapes have been used in recent aerodynamic testing at the Office National d’Etudes et Recherches Aérospatiales (ONERA) and Wichita State University (WSU) wind tunnels. The ONERA tests were at higher Reynolds number range in the order of 10 million, while the WSU tests were in the order of 1 million.

A CFD simulation methodology is presented to evaluate the ice that sheds from rotating components. The shedding detection is handled by coupling the ice accretion and stress analysis solvers to periodically check for the propagation of crack fronts and possible detachment. A novel approach for crack propagation is highlighted where no change in mesh topology is required. The entire computation from flow to impingement, ice accretion and crack analysis only requires a single mesh. The accretion and stress module are validated individually with published data. The analysis is extended to demonstrate potential shedding scenarios on three complex industrially-relevant 3D cases: a helicopter blade, an engine fan blade and a turboprop propeller. The largest shed fragment will be analyzed in the context of FOD damage to neighboring aircraft/component surfaces.

The importance of the variation of relative humidity across turbomachinery engine components for in-flight icing is shown by numerical analysis. A species transport equation for vapor has been added to the existing CFD methodology for the simulation of ice growth and water flow on engine components that are subject to ice crystal icing. This entire system couples several partial differential equations that consider heat and mass transfer between droplets, crystals and air, adding the cooling of the air due to particle evaporation to the icing simulation, increasing the accuracy of the evaporative heat fluxes on wetted walls. Three validation cases are presented for the new methodology: the first one compares with the numerical results of droplets traveling inside an icing tunnel with an existing evaporation model proposed by the National Research Council of Canada (NRC).

In order to achieve the purpose of saving energy and reducing emission, the improvement of aerodynamic performance plays an increasingly crucial role for car manufacturers. Previous studies have confirmed the validity of gradient-based adjoint algorithm for its high efficiency in shape optimization. In this paper, two important aspects of adjoint approach were explored. One is vehicle aerodynamic optimization with multiple objectives, and the other is using time-averaged flow results as the primal solution, both are issues of high interest in recent applications. First, adjoint shape optimization with steady-state and time-averaged flow simulations were respectively calculated and comparatively discussed based on a production SUV. The shape modifications of the two cases indicated that the impact of primal solution on design change could not be neglected, due to the different intrinsic codes of steady and transient turbulence models.