Numerical investigation on thermal and fluid dynamic behaviours in ice melting at pore scale

Abstract

A significant weather hazard for flying an airplane is icing. In this context, ice accumulation has recently been recognized as a risk to flight safety. A briefly review on the models used for investigating the icing phenomena is performed. The review topics are ice accretion models, icing phenomena, such as phase change material problem, and ice as porous medium. The results of the review show that a model at meso-scale level of ice melting or solidification is needed. Enthalpy porosity and volume of fluid models are employed to investigate the behaviour of air and ice during its melting at pore scale level. A numerical investigation based on air forced convection in phase change materials cell structures is accomplished. Ansys-Fluent code is employed to perform the numerical simulations. A validation for the combination of the two models is performed using a comparison with an experimental study. By means of the numerical investigation a permeability estimation of the porous medium during melting process is made. The results show that the comparisons between the permeability values by steady-state regime on assigned geometries are a good estimation of the permeability values of the solid matrix of the porous medium during the melting process.

Keywords

• Phase change material
• Cell structure
• Melting
• De-icing