The aim of this work is to develop a semi-empirical model for erosion phenomena under ice crystal condition, which is one of the major phenomena for ice crystal accretion. Such a model would be able to calculate the erosion rate caused by impinging ice crystals on accreted ice layer.
This model is based on Finnie [1] and Bitter [2] [3] solid/solid collision theory which assumes that metal erosion due to sand impingement is driven by two phenomena: cutting wear and deformation wear. These two phenomena are strongly dependent on the particle density, velocity and shape, as well as on the surface physical properties such as Young modulus, Poisson ratio, surface yield strength and hardness. Moreover, cutting wear is mostly driven by tangential velocity and is more effective for ductile eroded body, whereas deformation wear is driven by normal velocity and is more effective for brittle eroded body. Several researchers based their erosion modelling on these two phenomena such as Hutchings et al. [4] for deformation erosion, or Huang et al. [5] and Arabnejad et al. [6] for cutting and deformation erosion.
The main work of this paper is to develop an erosion model for ice crystal impingement based on these two phenomena, and to show its capability to predict accretion shape by simulating experimental cases from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). NRC’s Currie et al. ice crystal experiments [7] [8] realized in warm aerodynamic conditions, such as the one encountered in high icing severity areas of a turbofan engine, show accretion severity for a large range of liquid water content to total water content. In order to validate the erosion model based on solid/solid collision, this paper presents the simulation of the lower melting rate experiment. Results show fair agreement with experimental data and allow us to propose pertinent further work.
