Numerical analysis of droplet impingement for design and certification of aircraft ice protection system

To develop a computer tool for the design and certification of aircraft ice protection system, some specific algorithms were investigated to improve the computational efficiency of Lagrangian approach and extend its application in water impingement for aircraft components with complex shapes. The regulations and advisory materials for the airworthy design and certification of aircraft ice protection system were summarized firstly to outline the requirement of the droplet impingement analysis. An extended model of droplet dynamics was incorporated, where the heat and mass transfer between air and water/ice droplets were considered. A particle localization method was introduced to locate the position of the moving droplet in a fixed Eulerian grid, and new schemes of property interpolation were brought out for the multi-dimensional cell-centered grid, employing a new virtual grid based on the cell centroids. Finally, a computer code was developed based on the proposed algorithms and validated by the experiment data, where the results agree with the experiment data well.