Numerical Simulation of In-Flight Icing in Jet Engines

This chapter deals with in-flight icing in jet engines, describing the computational procedures and icing models, icing within the rotor/stator interaction fields, supercooled large droplet (SLD) icing on rotor blades, ice shedding from the fan, ice crystals icing, and introducing a hybrid grid- and particle-based method. The models are successfully applied to actual jet engines developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The results show that severe ice accretion occurs near the fan hub and that ice-shedding events can be faithfully reproduced by providing the adhesion force between the ice layer and the walls. In addition, ice crystal icing can be predicted by adequately estimating the temperature in the stator vanes. Because of the dearth of experimental icing data for jet engines, code validation is limited to two-dimensional cases. The simulation code is shown to reasonably predict the fundamental icing behavior and can thus be applied to icing problems in actual jet engines.