Icing wind tunnel measurements of supercooled large droplets using the 12 mm total water content cone of the Nevzorov probe

Abstract

Supercooled large droplet (SLD) icing can occur behind the protected surfaces of an aircraft and create severe aerodynamic disturbances, which represent a safety hazard for aviation. Liquid water content (LWC) measurements in icing conditions that contain SLDs require instruments that are able to sample unimodal and bimodal droplet size distributions with droplet diameters from 2 to 2000 µm. No standardized detection method exists for this task. A candidate instrument, which is currently used in icing wind tunnel (IWT) research, is the Nevzorov probe. In addition to the standard 8 mm total water content (TWC) collector cone, a novel instrument version also features a 12 mm diameter cone, which might be advantageous for collecting the large droplets characteristic of SLD conditions. In the scope of the two EU projects, SENSors and certifiable hybrid architectures for safer aviation in ICing Environment (SENS4ICE) and ICE GENESIS, we performed measurement campaigns in SLD icing conditions in IWTs in Germany, Austria and the USA. We obtained a comprehensive data set of measurements from the LWC sensor, the 8 mm cone sensor and the 12 mm cone sensor of the Nevzorov probe, and from the tunnel reference instrumentation. In combination with measurements of the particle size distribution, we experimentally derive a collision efficiency curve that is based on a suitable functional form for the new 12 mm cone for median volume diameters (MVDs) between 12 and 58 µm and wind tunnel speeds from 40 to 85 m s−1. Knowledge of this curve allows us to correct the LWC measurements of the 12 mm cone (LWC12) in particular for the inevitably high decrease in collision efficiency for small droplet diameters. In unimodal SLD conditions, with MVDs between 128 and 720 µm, LWC12 generally agrees within ±20 % with the tunnel LWC reference values from a WCM-2000 and an isokinetic probe. An increase in the difference between LWC12 and the WCM-2000 measurements at larger MVDs indicates better droplet collection properties of the 12 mm cone. Similarly, the favorable detector dimensions of the 12 mm cone explain a 7 % enhanced detection efficiency compared to the 8 mm cone; however this difference falls within the instrumental uncertainties. Data collected in various bimodal SLD conditions with MVDs between 16 and 534 µm and LWCs between 0.22 and 0.72 g m−3 also show an agreement within ±20 % between LWC12 and the tunnel LWC, which demonstrates the suitability of the Nevzorov sensor head with the 12 mm cone for measurements of LWC in Appendix O icing conditions.