AEE 572 Aircraft Icing

Prof. Dr. Serkan ÖZGEN

Dept. Aerospace Engineering, METU
Fall 2012-2013
 Outline

• Formation of ice in the atmosphere

• Supercooled water droplets
• Mechanism of aircraft icing
• Icing variations
• Ice growth
• Precipitation type and icing
• Precipitation and type of cloud

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 Outline-continued
• Physical factors affecting aircraft icing
• Icing intensity (severity)
• Liquid water content
• Temperature
• Droplet diameter
• Collection efficiency
• Airspeed
• Ice accretion modeling
– Flow field calculation
– Droplet trajectory calculation
– Thermodynamic analysis
– Ice accretion calculation

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 Formation of ice in the atmosphere

• Water is the only substance that can be found in all

three phases (gas, liquid, solid) in the atmosphere
depending on the temperature and pressure.
• The concentration of water vapor may range from
near zero in desert regions to as high as 4% in tropical
regions.
• Saturation occurs when water vapor is added to the
air or, when the air is cooled.

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 Formation of ice in the atmosphere
• Condensation nuclei: microscopic particles present in the
atmosphere, such as salt crystal, dust, and smoke
particles.
• Hygroscopic particles: particles which contribute to
transform the water vapor into liquid or ice.
– Condensation nucleus: 1m
– Droplet: 10 m (10 seconds)
– Droplet: 100 m (500 seconds)
– Rain drop > 200 m (3 hours)
 Collision/coalescence mechanisms

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 Supercooled water droplets
• Cloud droplets do not freeze until they reach temperatures
far below the freezing temperature.
• When temperature approaches -40oC the droplets freeze
rapidly and transform to ice crystals.
• Supercooled droplets: the droplets that stay liquid at
temperature below 0oC.
• Small droplets do not freeze at 0oC because their molecules
do not line up in the proper order to form ice crystals.
• Supercooled droplets are unstable and may rapidly change
from liquid to ice whenever their stability is perturbed.

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 Mechanism of aircraft icing
• Two conditions must be present:
– Ambient temperature must be below below 0oC,
– Supercooled water droplets must be present.
• As the impacting water droplets freeze, heat is released
so that their temperature rises until 0oC is reached.
After this freezing stops and the unfrozen water starts
to run back along the surface of the aircraft or along
existing ice and freeze downstream (runback ice).
– At cold temperatures a large part of a droplet freezes
– At higher temperatures only a small part freezes while the
remaining part freezes slowly.

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 Rime ice
• Rime ice is a dry, milky and opaque ice deposit which
usually occurs at low airspeed, low temperature and
low liquid water content.
• Characterized by instantaneous freezing of the
incoming supercooled water droplets upon impact
trapping the air inside. Freezing fraction = 1.
• As a consequence, the shape of the surface is altered
generating performance penalties due to the loss in the
aerodynamic characteristics and to the added weight
which introduces an unbalance of the aircraft
components during the flight.
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Rime ice

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 Glaze ice
• Glaze is a wet growth ice formed at a temperature
around 0oC and a high liquid water content .
• It has a clear appearance and a density closer to that of
the cloud water.
• It occurs when a fraction of the water droplets freezes
upon impact while the remainder droplets run back
along the surface and freeze downstream. Freezing
fraction < 1.
• This ice accretion process produces different ice shape
deposit: such as double horned, beak or a rounded
glaze ice.
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 Glaze ice
• Glaze ice accretion dangerously affects and alters the
shape of the original surface body producing
aerodynamic penalties much more severe than rime ice
accretion can cause.

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Glaze ice

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 Icing variations
• Icing intensity may be severe in some regions and light
in some other regions depending on the structure,
horizontal and vertical extents, and the contents of the
clouds.
• Icing conditions varies with altitude, season and
geographical regions.
• Icing is more serious in winter season at altitudes of
7000 to 9000 ft above ground level.
• In high altitude, above 20 000 ft (6 km) icing is rare and
have light intensity.

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 Icing variations
• The minimum low temperature for icing is -40oC, for
low temperatures all water droplet transform to ice
crystals.
• Icing may also vary with horizontal extent of clouds due
to the variation of liquid water content.

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Icing variations

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 Ice growth
• There are two mechanisms by which cloud droplets
grow:
– coalescence process which occurs because of the different fall
velocities of the cloud droplets,
– growth of ice crystals (Bergeron process) due to the
coexistence side by side of both ice crystals and cloud
droplets.

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Ice growth - coalescence

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Ice growth – Bergeron process

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Precipitation type and icing

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Precipitation type and icing

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 Physical factors affecting icing
• Meteorological and aerodynamical factors affecting
aircraft icing:
– liquid water content,
– temperature,
– droplet diameter,
– rate of catch.

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Icing intensity

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Icing intensity

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Icing intensity

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Liquid water content - cumulus clouds

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Liquid water content - stratiform clouds

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Liquid water content

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Liquid water content

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Temperature

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 Collection efficiency
• Is the ratio of the mass of droplets impinging on an
obstacle, such as wing or airfoil, in unit time to the
mass of droplets which would impinge if the droplets
were following straight line trajectories.

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Collection efficiency

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Collection efficiency (effect of
airspeed)

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 Airspeed
• When the airspeed is high water droplets do not have
enough time to deviate from the airfoil and follow
ballistic trajectories, thus more droplets impact on the
airfoil.
• As a consequence, the impingement zone will be wider
and the icing is expected to occur in a wider region.
• In addition, the velocity has an effect on the type of
icing due to aerodynamic heating effect. For high
velocity we usually have a glaze ice with horns which
may cause separation over the airfoil.

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Collection efficiency (effect of
airframe size)

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Collection efficiency (effect of
droplet size)

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 Airframe and droplet size
• A larger airframe will constitute a larger obstacle for the
incoming droplets causing them to deviate significantly
away from itself. As a result fewer droplets impact the
surface over a narrow impingement zone.
• Increasing droplet size has the same effect as increasing
the airspeed as far as the droplet trajectories are
concerned since the kinetic energy of the droplets
increase.

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 Ice accretion modeling

• The main objectives of ice accretion simulation:

– calculation of the impingement of the particles on the wing
which determines the droplet impingement regions,
– mass of liquid (ice) on the body surface,
– the tangent or limit trajectories used to determine catch
distributions or the global and local collection efficiency.

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 Ice accretion modeling

• The main applications of ice accretion simulation:

– predict the shape and the rate of ice growth on the airframe,
– predict aerodynamic performance degradations,
– use in the design of anti/deicing systems.

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 Ice accretion modeling

• There are four main steps in an icing simulation,

– flow field calculation,
– particle trajectories,
– thermodynamic analysis,
– ice accretion calculation.
• The computational procedure is an iterative process
with a time-stepping procedure where successive thin
ice layers are formed on the surface and followed by
flow field and droplet impingement recalculations.

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 Flow field calculation

• The flow field calculation is needed to determine the

velocity of air at any point in the flow field so that the
droplet trajectory calculations can be proceeded.
• Navier-Stokes (sophisticated but accurate) or
• Panel method (simpler but less accurate) can be used.
• Icing calculation accuracy does not improve significantly
with sophisticated methods.

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 Droplet trajectory calculation

• Droplets are released upstream of the wing and

followed until impact on the airfoil surface.
• The droplet equation of motion takes into account the
drag, buoyancy and gravitational forces.
• At each integration step, the local velocity needed to
solve the droplet equation of motion is obtained from
the flow field solution while the integration is
continued following droplets until they impinge on the
wing surface or pass downstream of the wing.
• Collection efficiency distribution is obtained.
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Droplet trajectory calculation
(single element airfoil)

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Droplet trajectory calculation
(airfoil with flap)

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Droplet trajectory calculation (wing)

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Collection efficiency distribution (wing)

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 Thermodynamic analysis
• The model is based on the first law of thermodynamics
stating that the mass and energy must be balanced in a
control volume.
• The mass balance will take into account
– the mass flow rate of the impinging water,
– the mass flow rate of water flowing into the control volume
(runback water from previous CV),
– the mass flow rate of water flowing out of the control volume
(runback water to next CV),
– the mass flow rate due to evaporation or sublimation,
– the mass flow rate of the freezing water.

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 Thermodynamic analysis
• The energy balance will take into account:
– the convective heat losses,
– the heat gain by friction,
– the enthalpy associated with impinging water,
– energy associated with runback water entering the control
volume,
– the enthalpy associated with evaporation or running back to
neighboring control volumes,
– the internal energy, calculated in relation to a given reference
state depending on the type of surface involved: dry, wet or
liquid.

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 Ice accretion calculation
• Messinger model (1953).
• 1-D phase change (Stefan) problem.
• Extended to handle 2 and 3-D problems by Myers
(2001).
• Consists of one mass conservation, one phase change
and two energy equations (one for the water and one
for the ice layer).

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Computed ice shape (wing)

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Ice thickness distribution (wing)

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