Aerodynamics of an airfoil with leading‐edge icing

Abstract

Abstract The flow over the leading edge of an NREL S826 reference airfoil with three different icing‐inspired leading‐edge contamination geometries has been assessed experimentally. Particle image velocimetry was performed on the leading edge of the airfoil for a range of angles‐of‐attack between −4° and 16°. This work primarily focuses on the flow physics at Reynolds numbers (Rec = 455 000) within the Reynolds number independent regime of the airfoil. The present work illuminates our understanding of the flow phenomena as well as provides a validation dataset for future numerical work. From the acquired data, the mean velocity, turbulent kinetic energy and mean vorticity have been estimated. The results show how the different contamination geometries affect the point of separation. It is also shown that the intermittency of the flow behind horn‐shaped contamination is dependent on the angle‐of‐attack, even at angles above stall. Proper orthogonal decomposition was performed on the velocity fields to identify whether reduced order modelling is an appropriate tool for rapid estimation of these flows. It was found that a limited number of modes carried a large fraction of the fluctuating energy, demonstrating that reduced order modelling is feasible.

Keywords

• airfoil
• contamination
• flow
• icing
• turbulence