An Unsteady Model for Aircraft Icing Based on Tightly-Coupled Method and Phase-Field Method

An unsteady tightly-coupled icing model is established in this paper to solve the numerical simulation problem of unsteady aircraft icing. The multi-media fluid of air and droplets is regarded as a single medium fluid with variable material properties. Taking the droplet concentration as the phase parameter and the droplet resistance coefficient as the interphase force, the mass concentration distribution of the droplet is obtained by solving the Cahn–Hilliard equation. Fick’s law is introduced to improve the Cahn–Hilliard equation to predict the droplet shadow zone. On this basis, the procedure of the unsteady numerical simulation method for aircraft icing is established, including grid generation, the dual-time-step method to realize the unsteady calculation of the air and droplet tightly-coupled mixed flow field, and the improved shallow water icing model. Finally, through the comparative analysis of numerical examples, the effectiveness of the new model in predicting the droplet impact characteristics and the droplet shadow zone are verified. Compared with other icing models, the ice shapes predicted by the unsteady tightly-coupled model were found to be the most consistent with the experiments. In the icing comparison conditions in this manuscript, the prediction accuracy of the ice thickness at the stagnation point of the leading edge was up to 35% higher than that of LEWICE.