In order to comply with applicable certification regulations, airframers have to demonstrate safe operation of their aircraft in icing conditions. Part of this demonstration is often a numerical prediction of the potential ice accretion on unprotected surfaces.
The software ONICE2D, originally developed at the Office National d'Études et de Recherche Aérospatial (ONERA), is used at Airbus for predicting ice accretions on wing-like geometries. The original version of the software uses a flow solution of the 2D full-potential equation on a structured C-grid as basis for an ice accretion prediction. Because of known limitations of this approach, an interface was added between ONICE2D and TAU [6], a hybrid flow solver for the Navier-Stokes equations.
The paper first details the approach selected to implement the interface to the hybrid flow solver TAU. It continues to explain how an automatic impingement and ice accretion calculation on multi-element configurations has been achieved. Finally, some of the validation results of the new ONICE2D code version are presented.