Validation Results of FENSAP-ICE at MHI

Numerical in-flight icing simulations have become a powerful tool in the type-certification process of commercial aircraft, helping to focus and reduce the number of flights in natural icing conditions and icing wind tunnel tests. Despite the numerical software's sophistication, applicants should always validate it for various icing conditions, and show good predictability to the aviation authorities. Icing being a key certification issue for the design of such aircraft because of its direct link to flight safety, MHI (Mitsubishi Heavy Industries) has early on adopted FENSAP-ICE and integrated this 3-D icing software into its Regional Jet program. The objective of this paper is to validate, on geometries of significance to MHI, this numerical tool for accuracy in predicting the flow field, droplet impingement and ice shapes. This step is required prior to integrating the software in the actual design process. For this purpose, some generic airfoils like NACA0012 were selected, and a range of icing conditions specified in Appendix C of FAR Part 25 tested. The numerical results are compared with published icing wind tunnel data and are shown to yield very good agreement.