Frossling Number Assessment for Airfoil Under Fully Turbulent Flow Conditions

Abstract

North American winters are notorious for aircraft icing, which is a direct threat to aviation safety. Existing high-fidelity codes successfully model icing/de-icing simulations and calculate convective heat transfer, with a penalty of a high computational cost. For a conceptual design of an ice protection system, however, correlations offer a quick approach to determine the average heat transfer rate on an airfoil. The objective of this paper is to introduce a novel correlation for the Frossling number on a NACA 0012, under fully turbulent flow conditions. The correlation is the result of curve fitting a heat transfer database, created using computational fluid dynamics simulations and valid for a wide range of Reynolds numbers and angles of attack. Moreover, the effects of using two different turbulence models as well as two different thermal boundary conditions are investigated. A flat plate test case is used to verify the heat transfer prediction, and airfoil simulations are validated with experimental measurements at the stagnation point. The final form of the correlation shows that a cubic variation of fits the computational fluid dynamics data best, with an average error of 2.14%.