A Preliminary Approach towards Rotor Icing Modeling Using the Unsteady Vortex Lattice Method

UAV rotors are at a high risk of ice accumulation during their operations in icing conditions. Thermal ice protection systems (IPSs) are being employed as a means of protecting rotor blades from ice, yet designing the appropriate IPS with the required heating density remains a challenge. In this work, a reduced-order modeling technique based on the Unsteady Vortex Lattice Method (UVLM) is proposed as a way to predicting rotor icing and to calculate the required anti-icing heat loads. The UVLM is gaining recent popularity for aircraft and rotor modeling. This method is flexible enough to model difficult aerodynamic problems, computationally efficient compared to higher-order CFD methods and accurate enough for conceptual design problems. A previously developed implementation of the UVLM for 3D rotor aerodynamic modeling is extended to incorporate a simplified steady-state icing thermodynamic model on the stagnation line of the blade. A viscous coupling algorithm based on a modified α-method incorporates viscous data into the originally inviscid calculations of the UVLM. The algorithm also predicts the effective angle of attack at each blade radial station (r/R), which is, in turn, used to calculate the convective heat transfer for each r/R using a CFD-based correlation for airfoils. The droplet collection efficiency at the stagnation line is calculated using a popular correlation from the literature. The icing mass and heat transfer balance includes terms for evaporation, sublimation, radiation, convection, water impingement, kinetic heating, and aerodynamic heating, as well as an anti-icing heat flux. The proposed UVLM-icing coupling technique is tested by replicating the experimental results for ice accretion and anti-icing of the 4-blade rotor of the APT70 drone. Aerodynamic predictions of the UVLM for the Figure of Merit, thrust, and torque coefficients agree within 10% of the experimental measurements. For icing conditions at −5 °C, the proposed approach overestimates the required anti-icing flux by around 50%, although it sufficiently predicts the effect of aerodynamic heating on the lack of ice formation near the blade tips. At −12 °C, visualizations of ice formation at different anti-icing heating powers agree well with UVLM predictions. However, a large discrepancy was found when predicting the required anti-icing heat load. Discrepancies between the numerical and experimental data are largely owed to the unaccounted transient and 3D effects related to the icing process on the rotating blades, which have been planned for in future work.

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