Improvement of Icing Simulation with Novel Ice Crystal Sticking Model

Aircraft jet engines can encounter ice crystal icing, leading to engine blockage or failure. This paper presents a novel ice crystal sticking model on the National Numerical Wind-tunnel-ICE (NNW-ICE) icing platform, incorporating the incoming Mach number and ice crystal melting ratio, which significantly impact icing simulation precision. We developed a comprehensive ice crystal icing numerical method which encompassed the coupled ice crystal motion-heat and mass transfer, collection coefficients, sticking coefficients, ice thermodynamic accretion, and the erosion mass rate. Using a two-dimensional crowned cylinder as a simulation object, we obtained ice shapes under different incoming flow and cloud conditions. The ice shape computational results were compared with experimental data. It is evident that the relative errors between the maximum ice thickness (icing severity) results and the experimental data are less than 18% and 7% for [Formula: see text] and 0.40, respectively. Additionally, the simulation demonstrated that the icing severity reaches its peak when the melting ratio falls within the range of 10 to 20%. The study obtained information on how the laws of the incoming stream Mach number and melting ratio influence the sticking coefficient. It also revealed the mechanisms through which the melting ratio and total water content influence the icing severity.