Experimental Study on Adhesive Characteristics of Aircraft Dynamic Icing

Abstract

The adhesive properties of aircraft icing play an important role in guiding the design of protection systems, while the formation environment, freezing process, and measurement methods have a great impact on the mechanical characteristics of ice, leading to significant differences in the available experimental results. Therefore, to improve the proximity between the experimental simulation and the actual process of inflight ice shedding, a generation system for the water cloud environment was built and integrated with a set of rotary measuring mechanisms in this paper, allowing the adhesion strength of impact ice to be measured online. In the present test, the appearance characteristics of ice formed under different conditions were observed and analyzed, with the range of its adhesion strength determined. And the effects of freezing mode, ambient temperature, and wind speed on ice adhesion were further discussed. It can be found that the impact ice has a more irregular shape and less adhesion compared to the static ice, and this difference will grow larger with the drop in ambient temperature. In addition, the adhesion of ice first increases and then decreases with the rising ambient temperature, reaching the maximum value (0.254 MPa) around −12 °C. When the flow velocity in the test section increases, the freezing process of water on the substrate will slow down, leading to greater surface adhesion.