Section: Application Domains

Inflight icing and ice shedding

Actual concerns about greenhouse gases lead to changes in aircraft design with an increased use of composite materials. This offers new possibilities for the design of ice protection systems. These systems remove ice formed on the protected surfaces following a periodic cycle. One of their drawbacks of de-icing device is that ice pieces shed into the flow and may cause impact/ingestion on/in aircraft components located downstream. Aircraft manufacturers rely mainly on flight tests to evaluate the potential negative effects of ice shedding because of the lack of appropriate numerical tools. The random shape and size taken by ice shed particles together with their rotation as they move make it difficult for classical CFD tools to predict trajectories. The numerical simulation of a full unsteady viscous flow, with a set of moving bodies immersed within, shows several difficulties for grid based methods. Drawbacks income from the meshing procedure for complex geometries and the re-griding procedure in tracing the body motion. A new approach that take into account the effect of ice accretion on flow field is used to solve the ice trajectory problem. The approach is based on mesh adaptation, penalization method and level sets.