An Analysis of Turbofan Inlet Water and Ice Concentration Effects in Icing Conditions

This paper presents liquid water and ice crystal collection effects for a generic axisymmetric turbofan engine inlet over a range of flight Mach numbers, inlet mass flow ratios, droplet inertia parameters and droplet free stream Reynolds numbers. The ingested water mass flow is properly defined in the context of an Eulerean droplet trajectory calculation method to obtain the collection efficiency. Collection efficiency is then correlated against the mass flow ratio of the airflow rather than the velocity ratio as has been common practice. These results are also compared against published test results. The local concentration effect of liquid water content (LWC) is also described, which can be important in aircraft probe design and placement.