PoliMIce: A simulation framework for three-dimensional ice accretion

A modeling framework is developed to perform two- and three-dimensional simulations of ice accretion over solid bodies in a wet air flow. The PoliMIce (Politecnico di Milano Ice accretion software) library provides a general interface allowing different aerodynamic and ice accretion software to communicate. The built-in ice accretion engine moves from the well-known Myers approach and it includes state-of-the-art ice formation models. The ice accretion engine implements a fully three-dimensional representation of the two-phase flow over the solid body, accounting for both rime and glaze ice formation. As an improvement over the reference model, a parabolic temperature profile is assumed to guarantee the consistency with respect to the wall boundary conditions. Moreover, the mass balance is generalized to conserve the liquid fraction at the interface between the glaze and the rime ice types. Numerical simulations are presented regarding in-flight ice accretion over two-dimensional airfoils and three-dimensional straight- and swept-wings. The CFD open-source software OpenFOAM was used to compute the aerodynamic field and the droplet trajectories. Simulation results compare fairly well with available experiments on ice accretion.