A preliminary investigation into icing accretion around a wavy leading-edge wing

Da Ronch, Andrea, Immordino, Gabriele and Kim, Jae Wook (2023) A preliminary investigation into icing accretion around a wavy leading-edge wing. In AIAA SCITECH 2023 Forum. Aerospace Research Central.. (doi:10.2514/6.2023-2459 Read Now).

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

We explore the aerodynamic characteristics of wavy leading-edge wings in typical icing conditions. Aerodynamic and aero-acoustic characteristics for these wings are well-known, but the body of work on their aero-icing characteristics is practically absent. We performed multi-shot icing simulations around a set of wavy wings, for different values of amplitude and wavelength of the tubercles. We analysed the flow physics around the wavy wings operating under rime and glaze ice conditions, and used a straight leading-edge wing as reference. We found that, generally, a wavy wing performs better than a straight wing. Tubercles on a wavy leading-edge wing do not prevent ice accretion - ice still forms in a comparable manner to that on a straight wing. The role of tubercles is to passively mitigate the adverse effects of ice accretion, developing flow structures that delay flow separation. Our study reveals that the passive mitigation increases for increasing the amplitude-to-wavelength ratio. Final remarks are also given pertaining to re-meshing around the iced surface.

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