Search

Numerical simulations of ice crystal icing within an experimental single-stage compressor test rig representative of realistic aeronautical engines are investigated. This paper aims to assess the icing models in CEDRE multi-physics CFD code recently developed and implemented. Gas flow, ice crystal trajectories, fragmentation dynamics and melting along the geometry are successively computed before the ice accretion in the test article is calculated using a surfacic solver that includes recently developed erosion and porosity models. Three experimental operating points are considered, with wet bulb temperatures increasing from negative to positive values and respectively exhibiting no accretion, significant accretion and moderate accretion. The comparison of simulation results with experiments for these cases shows a good agreement in terms of occurrence, location and surfacic extension of accretion phenomena. Nevertheless, a global shift in the inlet temperature is necessary to reproduce experimental results.

International audience; The current work deals with the numerical simulation of ice crystal trajectories within an experimental single stage compressor test rig. First, ice crystal trajectories and the associated fragmentation dynamics within the compressor stage are investigated for different rotor speeds. To this purpose, numerical simulations with two different fragmentation models are compared for cold conditions, i.e. with a sufficiently negative wet bulb temperature to totally inhibit melting. The comparison between the fragmentation models aims at assessing the capabilities of a recently proposed ice crystal fragmentation model with respect to a state of the art model. Both models show good agreement with experimental size distribution data as they reproduce the size reduction of the ice crystals with increasing rotational speed. In a second step, three experimental operating points with wet bulb temperatures raising from negative to positive values and respectively exhibiting no, significant and moderate melting, are simulated. Here, the comparison of numerical and experimental results highlights the strong sensitivity of the ice particles' melt ratio to inlet temperature variations, even by a few degrees.