Simulation of Airfoil Icing with a Novel Morphogenetic Model

In this paper, we describe a new modeling approach to tackle the challenging problem of in-flight icing prediction. In this approach, termed morphogenetic modeling, we predict the structural details of aircraft ice accretion by emulating the behavior of individual fluid elements. A two-dimensional morphogenetic model is used here to predict the ice accretion shape forming on a National Advisory Committee For Aeronautics 0012 airfoil under various atmospheric conditions. The influence of the surface heat transfer formulation on the ice accretion shape is examined. We complement the numerical simulation with an analytical model for airfoil icing that is based on a simple form of the mass and heat conservation equations. This analytical investigation allows us to identify a significant new dimensionless ratio, the runback factor, defined as the ratio of the impinging water mass flux to the freezing mass flux at the stagnation line. An increasing runback factor leads to a quantifiable downstream displacement of the accretion mass. We also use the analytical model to verify the morphogenetic model during the early stages of icing, and find that there is reasonable agreement between the two models in terms of ice accretion shape. A comparison with experimental data and other models shows that even simple morphogenetic modeling is competitive with existing models. Further improvements will take advantage of the model’s unique ability to simulate discontinuous ice accretions in complex geometries, leading to a considerable advancement in the simulation of in-flight icing.