Electrothermal Airfoil Anti-icing System Simulation

In this paper a simple mathematical model and a numerical simulation method for the analysis of airfoil electrothermal anti-icing systems are presented. With the assumption of that the airfoil surface temperature is equal to the temperature of the runback water film, a mass balance is applied to the runback water flow and an energy balance is applied to the airfoil skin. The flow field and the water impingement are predicted using the Eulerian method, based on FLUENT and its user-defined functions. Reference case is selected for the validation of the presented mathematical model and the numerical method. The results were compared with both the published experimental and numerical results and show satisfactory. Two distributions of heat transfer coefficient for the same case obtained from the literatures are used for studying the influence to the surface temperature and the mass loss of the evaporation. The anti-icing numerical model and simulation method presented in this paper can be applied for the design of the anti-icing system.