In-flight icing is a safety-critical aspect of aircraft design, yet it is a highly complex physical phenomenon that is extremely difficult to replicate using expensive physical tests. Recent regulatory changes and industry focus on the particular hazards presented by high-altitude ice crystals and supercooled large droplets (SLD) have further challenged the design process and the time to market for new aircraft and technology.
New: Accurately Predict Ice Shedding
An enhanced stress solver accurately solves for cracking and the mass of accreted ice shedding due to rotational and aerodynamic forces. This new feature can be used for fan blades, propellers and helicopter rotors. For rotating components, ice shedding could cause imbalance, downstream damage or even contamination in a combustor.
Ice accretion and subsequent cracking and shedding on aircraft engine fan blades.
New: CFX Support for Anti-Icing
CFX can now be used to accurately assess anti-icing performance for conjugate heat transfer (CHT) analyses.
Commercial aircraft cruise at altitudes where adverse meteorological phenomena such as icing clouds are rare and can generally be avoided. But during take-off and landing, they may not be able to avoid crossing atmospheric layers where adverse flight conditions may be encountered at the worst possible time: at low speeds and high angles of attack, when even small amounts of ice build-up can radically degrade the carefully optimized aerodynamic performance of wings and control surfaces. Commercial aircraft are therefore fitted with ice protection systems and must be certified to fly safely in known icing conditions.
Ansys FENSAP-ICE provides leading three-dimensional, state-of-the-art, design and aid-to-certification simulation software to provide enhanced aerodynamic and in-flight icing protection solutions in a cost-effective manner by addressing all five major aspects of in-flight icing:
- Airflow
- Droplet and ice crystal impingement
- Ice accretion
- Aerodynamic degradation
- Anti- and de-icing heat loads
FENSAP-ICE is compatible with widely used CAD-based mesh generators so it can often reuse the meshes already produced for aerodynamic studies. Having no significant geometric limitations, it is applicable to aircraft, rotorcraft, UAVs, jet engines, nacelles, probes, detectors and other installed systems. OptiGrid is an anisotropic mesh optimization tool that is included to easily obtain high quality mesh- and user-independent results.
Capabilities
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Ice Accretion
Calculate the shapes and roughness distributions of glaze, rime or mixed-type ice accretion on aircraft surfaces ranging from wings to air data probes.
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Aerodynamic Performance Penalty Analysis
Assess the adverse effects of ice accretion on aircraft surfaces, losses in lift-to-drag ratios, increased blockage of screens and engine passages, and more.
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Ice Crystal and Supercooled Large Droplets
FENSAP-ICE models supercooled large droplets and irregularly shaped ice crystals in compliance with the requirements of icing certification envelopes in Appendix O and Appendix D.
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Turbomachinery Icing
FENSAP-ICE predicts ice accretion due to droplets and ice crystal ingestion in the gas path of turbofan engine compressors.
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Ice Protection System Analysis
Assess the performance of bleed-air and electro-thermal IPS to ensure protection against adverse in-flight icing conditions.
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Mesh Optimization with OptiGrid
OptiGrid provides solution-based anisotropic mesh optimization for high-precision CFD simulations on unstructured hybrid grids at the lowest possible computational cost.
