Acoustic Characterization of Glaze and Rime Ice Structures on an Oscillating Airfoil via Fully Unsteady Simulations

Abstract

The development of low-cost and simple technologies to improve pilot awareness of icing environments is crucial to improve the safety of rotorcraft, and especially those with limited icing clearance which are admittedly operating within icing environments without full icing clearance. An acoustic characterization of glaze and rime ice structures is hereby introduced to begin to quantify different ice shape noise signatures which directly transcend from the iced performance characteristics to develop acoustic ice detection technologies. The feasibility of the detection technique is assessed for fully unsteady simulations of ice accretion on an oscillating, two-dimensional airfoil. This work focuses on the computational modeling of the experimental database of a rotor airfoil with pitching motion during icing conditions from the NASA Glenn Icing Research Wind Tunnel and computing the resultant noise signals and analyzing their topology.