Computational Fluid Dynamics’ (CFD) Recent Contributions to Increased Safety for Flying Into Known Icing (FIKI)

Wagdi Habashi
Newmerical

Despite the concerted efforts of manufacturers and certification agencies incidents and accidents continue to happen to certificated aircraft, falsely thought of as “immune to in-flight icing”. The lecture will review the traditional process of ice protection system (IPS) design and of aircraft certification. It will illustrate how the sequential process of first freezing the aerodynamic design of an aircraft, then designing an IPS, is not the best way, as aerodynamics and icing susceptibility are intimately linked. It will show that the current certification process of ice shape prediction, icing tunnel testing and finally flying in natural ice conditions, has many gaps that can only be filled by modern (three-dimensional, compressible, turbulent) CFD. The conclusion will be that, by using recent tools designed to simulate both the aerodynamics and icing in a concurrent engineering sense, and utilizing Computational Fluid Dynamics, Fluid-Structure interaction, and Reduced Order Modeling, as true companions to testing, a more complete and thorough evaluation of the aircraft’s FIKI can be made, leading to a much safer aircraft.