An efficient method to simulate water droplet trajectory and impingement

Ice formation on aircraft is of great safety concern because icing may lead the aircraft to a dangerous situation quickly. Numerical method for determining the trajectories of the water droplets is the base of the icing research and the design of the anti-icing system. The traditional Lagrangian method for simulating water droplet trajectory and impingement has some shortages such as lower computation efficiency and poor applicability currency in peculiar geometry. In order to overcome these shortages, an improved Lagrangian method was developed. It′s based on the calculation of the flow field around icing surface, using a method of searching extended target to calculate the droplet location and determining the insert value of flow field information at the droplet location in a grid cell, the boundary of the droplet trajectories are judged based on a manage system of boundary information with framework structure. The method can overcome theses shortages meanwhile maintaines the robustness of original method. Local droplet collection and impingement efficiency at NACA0012 and multi-element airfoils are calculated with this method in order to verify its correctness. The results show that the improved method is very efficient, reliable, and robust. Furthermore, it can be used in different geometries directly.