New density calculation method for aircraft icing based on wind tunnel experiments and 3D micro-structure modeling

Aircraft icing seriously threatens flight safety, thus studying its quantitative properties can provide a deep understanding of how icing occurs and how to treat it. In this paper, methods of 3D modeling for ice micro-structure and ice density calculation are proposed based on wind tunnel experiments. Firstly, a variational segmentation method is presented to extract the quantitative information of icing pores, and stochastic analysis of pores characteristic is implemented. Then a 3D model of the micro-structure is established based on the specific assumptions and the micro quantitative formation. Finally, the icing density can be easily obtained by the mixture density calculating method. In the experiments, the 3D modeling results of icing micro-structure and density calculation results under different icing conditions are given, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Furthermore, the influences of two parameters in the density calculation are analyzed to give a clear understanding of how the parameters work.