Improvements in Numerical Analysis of Droplet Impingement Using Lagrangian Approach

Lagrangian approach has been widely adopted in the droplet impingement analysis for aircraft icing simulation. Some improvements were proposed, including: 1) The heat and mass transfer consideration in droplet dynamics; 2) More efficient droplet localization method, which could and facilitated to find the initial cell in Eulerian grid; 3) New computation method of impingement efficiency, which uses the cover ratio to transform the impingement efficiency of arbitrary impinged region to that of the cell element of body surface and avoids the iterative computation to find the trajectories reaching the corner of the panel or cell element. A numerical solver was built and integrated with the capabilities to deal with super-cooled large droplet (SLD) conditions by considering the splashing and bouncing of SLD. The computational results were validated with the experiment data, which shown good agreements in the impingement limitations and tendency.