A spongy icing model for aircraft icing

Researches have indicated that impinging droplets can be entrapped as liquid in the ice matrix and the temperature of accreting ice surface is below the freezing point. When liquid entrapment by ice matrix happens, this kind of ice is called spongy ice. A new spongy icing model for the ice accretion problem on airfoil or aircraft has been developed to account for entrapped liquid within accreted ice and to improve the determination of the surface temperature when entering clouds with supercooled droplets. Different with conventional icing model, this model identifies icing conditions in four regimes: rime, spongy without water film, spongy with water film and glaze. By using the Eulerian method based on two-phase flow theory, the impinging droplet flow was investigated numerically. The accuracy of the Eulerian method for computing the water collection efficiency was assessed, and icing shapes and surface temperature distributions predicted with this spongy icing model agree with experimental results well.