A numerical study of droplet impingement for in-flight ice accretion prediction

Abstract

Droplet impingement is the basic module in both ice accretion and anti-icing numerical calculation. A three dimensional finite volume approach with the capacity of modeling the in-flight droplet impingement on a wide range of subsonic regime is therefore established in this research, using OpenFOAM®. The Eulerian model is applied to estimate the droplet flow field with the same computational grid sets as those of the air flow calculation. The roughness effect caused by ice accretion is considered in the wall function modeling. Thus, the collection efficiency could be investigated for further icing numerical simulations. This approach is validated on both cylinder and sphere benchmark cases. The results are compared with the corresponding experimental and LEWICE (LEWis ICE accretion program) simulation data.