Comparison of Computational and Experimental Ice Accretions of Large Swept Wings

A comparison of computational and experimental ice accretions generated on three swept-wing models in the NASA Glenn Icing Research Tunnel is presented. The wind tunnel models span floor to ceiling and present the same full-scale leading edges of three different spanwise wing stations of the 65%-scale modern commercial aircraft known as the Common Research Model. Experimental ice shapes were generated on the leading edge of each model for a set of icing conditions and digitized with a three-dimensional (3-D) laser scanner, representing the ice accretions that would be obtained at their corresponding stations on the full-scale wing. Computational ice shapes were generated on the same wind tunnel models at the same flow and icing conditions of the experiment, using 3-D Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes computational fluid dynamics code OVERFLOW for the flowfield, and LEWICE3D for the 3-D ice-accretion simulations. Results show large swept-wing ice accretions from high-quality experiments and state-of-the-art ice-accretion computational tools. The comparison between experiments and numerical simulations demonstrates the capabilities and limitations of the current computational tools in modeling the physics of complex 3-D flowfield and ice accretion, and indicates the need for further development and research exploration.