Application of Extended Messinger Models to Complex Geometries

Since, ice accretion can significantly degrade the performance and the stability of an airborne vehicle, it is imperative to be able to model it accurately. While ice accretion studies have been performed on airplane wings and helicopter blades in abundance, there are few that attempt to model the process on more complex geometries such as fuselages. This paper proposes a methodology that extends an existing in-house Extended Messinger solver to complex geometries by introducing the capability to work with unstructured grids and carry out spatial surface streamwise marching.

For the work presented here commercial solvers such as STAR-CCM+ and ANSYS Fluent are used for the flow field and droplet dispersed phase computations. The ice accretion is carried out using an in-house icing solver called GT-ICE. The predictions by GT-ICE are compared to available experimental data, or to predictions by other solvers such as LEWICE and STAR-CCM+. Three different cases with varying levels of complexity are presented. The first case considered is a commercial transport airfoil, followed by a three-dimensional MS(1)-317 swept wing. Finally, ice accretion calculations performed on a Robin fuselage have been discussed. Good agreement with experimental data, where applicable, is observed. Differences between the ice accretion predictions by different solvers have been discussed.