Simulation of atomization equipment in icing cloud simulation system

Aircraft icing may occur when an aircraft flies through the cloud containing a large number of super-cooled water droplets or ice crystals, causing controlling performance degradation or even threatens to flight safety. Research on aircraft icing focusing on the development of aircraft icing protection system (IPS) has been carried out earlier. With the development of aircraft and helicopters, higher requirements will be put forward to prevent ice accretion, and it is necessary to simulate the icing environment of aircraft in order to meet the needs of this development. In order to simulate the natural icing environment, the climatic environmental test facility (CETF) was developed. The key component in CETF is atomization equipment, which is used to spray micro-sized water droplets into super-cooled airflow and create artificial icing clouds. The universality of the artificial icing cloud in different operation conditions will determine the comprehensive performance of CETF; therefore, the study performed a numerical investigation to provide a reference design and optimization suggestions on the atomization equipment. To determine the position of the test specimen, the modified Rosin–Rammler distribution for droplets and discrete phase model (DPM) has been adopted to obtain the flow quality and icing cloud characteristics. Results indicate that the distance of 2m to the outlet of sprays is the best position for tests. Since the computations on the inner flow field of atomization equipment suggest that the supplement temperature of water need to be higher than 30˚C to prevent the sprays from freezing, the freeze protection has been taken into account. The present work showed highly practical value in the development of CETF and many other similar facilities in the future.