Avani Gupta
(Advisor: Prof. Lakshmi N. Sankar)

will propose a doctoral thesis entitled,

Application of an Extended Messinger Model to                                                                      Ice Accretion on Complex Geometries

On

Friday, February 7 at 10:00 a.m.
Montgomery Knight Building 317

Abstract
Ice accretion can significantly degrade the performance and the stability of an airborne vehicle.  Therefore, it is important to model this phenomenon accurately. While researchers have conducted extensive ice accretion studies in the past on airplane wings and helicopter blades, very few of these studies are for more complex geometries such as fuselages. This work proposes a methodology that extends an existing in-house Extended Messinger ice accretion solver to complex geometries on unstructured grids, with a marching process along surface streamlines to handle three-dimensional flow effects.

The work completed to date includes sensitivity studies for ice accretion and shedding on shortened Schweizer 269 main rotor blades and two-dimensional steady and oscillating airfoil ice accretion cases, on structured grids. Towards the goal of developing unstructured grid based methodologies, several different cases with varying levels of complexity have been completed. These include a commercial transport airfoil, a three-dimensional MS(1)-317 swept wing at different angles of attack, and the Robin fuselage.

Unstructured grid based analyses using commercial solvers such as STAR-CCM+ and ANSYS Fluent have been used to date for the flow field and water droplet dispersed phase computations. The ice accretion is carried out using an in-house analysis called GT-ICE. The predictions by GT-ICE have compared to available experimental data, and to predictions by LEWICE, an industry standard solver developed at the NASA Glenn Research Center.

The proposed work includes the development of an unstructured grid based Eulerian droplet trajectory and collection efficiency methodology using public domain modules within OpenFOAM, coupled to a surface streamline visualization and data extraction process using the public domain solver ParaView.  GT-ICE will be employed for ice accretion computations. The new methodology is capable of handling 2D and 3D, structured and unstructured, steady and unsteady flow analyses.

Committee

• Prof. Lakshmi N. Sankar – School of Aerospace Engineering (advisor)
• Prof. Jechiel Jagoda – School of Aerospace Engineering
• Prof. Stephen M. Ruffin – School of Aerospace Engineering
• Richard E. Kreeger – NASA Glenn Research Center