Ice crystal ingestion by turbofans
Authors:   , Ríos Pabón Manuel A. , Cho Young I. 
Published: July 2021

This Thesis will present the problem of inflight icing in general and inflight icing caused by the ingestion of high altitude ice crystals produced by high energy mesoscale convective complexes in particular, and propose a new device to prevent it based on dielectric barrier discharge plasma. Inflight icing is known to be the cause of 583 air accidents and more than 800 deaths in more than a decade. The new ice crystal ingestion problem has caused more than 100 flights to lose engine power since the 1990's, and the NTSB identified it as one of the causes of the Air France flight 447 accident in 1-Jun-2008. The mechanics of inflight icing not caused by ice crystals are well established. Aircraft surfaces exposed to supercooled liquid water droplets will accrete ice in direct proportion of the droplet catch and the freezing heat transfer process. The multiphase flow droplet catch is predicted by the simple sum of forces on each spherical droplet and a droplet trajectory calculation based on Lagrangian or Eulerian analysis. The most widely used freezing heat transfer model for inflight icing caused by supercooled droplets was established by Messinger. Several computer programs implement these analytical models to predict inflight icing, with LEWICE being based on Lagrangian analysis and FENSAP being based on Eulerian analysis as the best representatives among them. This Thesis presents the multiphase fluid mechanics particular to ice crystals, and explains how it differs from the established droplet multiphase flow, and the obstacles in implementing the former in computational analysis. A new modification of the Messinger thermal model is proposed to account for ice accretion produced by ice crystal impingement. Because there exist no computational and experimental ways to fully replicate ice crystal inflight icing, and because existing ice protections systems consume vast amounts of energy, a new ice protection device based on dielectric barrier discharge plasma is proposed and built in this Thesis, called DBDAIS, with a complete description of the anti-ice cycle. Contrary to existing ice protection systems, which either heat the aircraft surfaces, or mechanically remove the accreted ice, the DBDAIS employs non-thermal plasma discharges to prevent ice accretion. A new apparatus that mimics inflight icing based on combining the liquid sprays of liquid nitrogen and water was designed and fabricated, named LNITA. The apparatus produces ice similar to glaze ice and rime ice, the two characteristic types of ice from inflight icing, at the cost of 1% of similar tests in icing wind tunnels. Nineteen experiments of the DBDAIS were performed in the LNITA. The results from the experiments point to 32 kV and 4 kHz being adequate to prevent ice accretion, with a power consumption of 1 W/cm2. This compares favorably to existing ice protection systems, which typically run at 10 W/cm2, and to the power consumption of a typical electric stove burner at maximum power, which is 5 W/cm2. To complete this Thesis, a design and development project is proposed to implement the DBDAIS in Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), with the selection of standard FAA inflight icing conditions, the run of 240 LEWICE simulations, and an analysis of the run results. The computational results lead to the design of a wing boot covering the airfoil from 20% of the lower pressure surface to 4% of the upper suction surface as the optimal protection for a UAS.