FENSAP-ICE's three-dimensional in-flight ice accretion module: ICE3D

Two-dimensional and quasi-three-dimensional in-flight ice accretion simulation codes have been increasingly, used by the aerospace industry in the last two decades as an aid to the certification process. Such codes predict two-dimensional sectional ice shapes, which are then manufactured from a light material and attached as disposable profiles on test aircraft to investigate them for stability under icing encounters. Although efficient for calculating ice shapes on simple geometries, current codes encounter major difficulties or simply cannot simulate ice shapes on truly three-dimensional geometries such as nonaxisymetric nacelles, high-lift wings, engine intakes, or systems that combine external and internal flows. Modern computational fluid dynamics approaches may not encounter or engender these difficulties, and FENSAP-ICE is a combination of four modules forming a complete and generic in-flight icing simulation system, built in a way to solve successively impingement, ice accretion, heat loads, and performance degradation via new mathematical models based on the Navier-Stokes equations for the flow and Navier-Stokes-like partial differential equations for the three other processes. The set of equations describing FENSAP-ICE's airflow solver, FENSAP, its impingement module, DROP3D, and its accretion module, ICE3D, are presented. Also a validation roadmap of ICE3D, for both two- and three-dimensional geometries, is presented.