Progress in development of a Navier-Stokes solver for evaluation of iced airfoil performance

A method is being developed for evaluation of the flow field behavior about an airfoil with significant ice accretion on the leading edge. The computer code, being evaluated for this purpose, solves the Navier-Stokes equations in a body-fitted curvilinear coordinate system. This requires the use of a grid generation code to transform the x-y coordinates of the physical space into xi-eta coordinates of the computational space. Evaluation of the suitability of these two codes for predicting iced airfoil performance is presently being carried out in anticipation of use in an overall icing analysis effort. Results of this evaluation to date indicate good correlation with known information on clean airfoils. Preliminary results for rime and glaze, iced airfoil shapes are also presented.