Ice accretion effect on the aerodynamic characteristics of KC-100 aircraft

Abstract

In-flight icing is a serious hazard for flight safety. Ice accretion due to in-flight icing can affect the air flow of an aircraft; for example, it can increase drag, decrease lift, and degrade control authority. Thus, its effects must be checked during design and development by various methods such as theoretical analysis, icing wind tunnel experiments, and flight testing. Traditionally, icing simulation techniques based on the Lagrangian approach for droplet impingement and the potential flow code for aerodynamic simulation have been applied. However, such methods have difficulty in analyzing the icing effect on a full three-dimensional configuration of an aircraft. In this work, in order to realistically compute three-dimensional droplet impingement and ice accretion on an aircraft, an Eulerian model for biphasic airflows containing water droplets was employed. Using numerical simulation, the effect of ice accretion on the aerodynamic characteristics of KC-100 aircraft, particularly, the maximum lift coefficient and the stall, were investigated. Finally, the collection efficiency and the shape of ice accretion on the full-scale KC-100 aircraft were predicted. Copyright ? 2010 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.