Modeling In-Flight Ice Accretion Under Uncertain Conditions

International audience; In-flight ice accretion under parametric uncertainty is investigated. Three test cases are presented which reproduce experiments carried out at the NASA's Glenn Icing Research Tunnel (IRT) facility. A preliminary accuracy assessment, achieved comparing numerical predictions against experimental observations, confirm the robustness and the predictiveness of the computerized icing model. Besides, sensitivity analyses highlight the variance of the targeted outputs with respect to the different uncertain inputs. In rime icing conditions, a predominant role is played by the uncertainty affecting the airfoil angle of attack, the cloud liquid water content and the droplets’ mean volume diameter. In glaze icing condition, the sensitivity analysis shows instead that the output variability is due mainly to the ambient temperature uncertainty. Results expose a major criticality of standard uncertainty quantification techniques. The issue is inherent the approximation of the full icing model behavior in domain regions scarcely affected by ice build up. To mitigate the issue, a non-linear regression method is proposed and applied.