Aircraft Icing

Icing Physics

Prof. Dr. Serkan ÖZGEN

Dept. Aerospace Engineering, METU
October 2020
 Outline

• Formation of ice in the atmosphere

• Supercooled water droplets
• Mechanism of aircraft icing
• Icing variations
• Ice growth
• Precipitation type and icing
• Precipitation and type of cloud

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 Outline-continued
• Physical factors effecting aircraft icing
• Icing intensity (severity)
• Liquid water content
• Temperature
• Droplet diameter
• Collection efficiency
• Airspeed
• Ice accretion modeling
– Flow field calculation
– Droplet trajectory calculation
– Thermodynamic analysis
– Ice accretion calculation

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 Formation of ice in the atmosphere

• Water is the only substance that can be found in all three

phases (gas, liquid, solid) in the atmosphere depending on the
temperature and pressure.
• The concentration of water vapor may range from near zero in
desert regions to as high as 4% in tropical regions.
• Saturation occurs when water vapor is added to the air or
when the air is cooled.

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 Formation of ice in the atmosphere

• Condensation nuclei: microscopic particles present in the

atmosphere, such as salt crystal, dust, and smoke particles.
• Hygroscopic particles: particles which contribute to transform
the water vapor into liquid or ice.
– Condensation nucleus: 1m
– Droplet: 10 m (10 seconds)
– Droplet: 100 m (500 seconds)
– Rain drop > 200 m (3 hours)
 Collision/coalescence mechanisms

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 Supercooled water droplets
• Cloud droplets do not freeze until they reach temperatures far
below the freezing temperature.
• When temperature approaches -40oC the droplets freeze rapidly
and transform to ice crystals.
• Supercooled droplets: the droplets that stay liquid at
temperatures below 0oC.
• Small droplets do not freeze at 0oC because their molecules do
not line up in the proper order to form ice crystals.
• Supercooled droplets are unstable and may rapidly change from
liquid to ice whenever their stability is perturbed.

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 Mechanism of aircraft icing
• Two conditions must be present:
– Ambient temperature must be below below 0oC,
– Supercooled water droplets must be present.
• As the impacting water droplets freeze, heat is released so that
their temperature rises until 0oC is reached. After this freezing
stops and the unfrozen water starts to run back along the surface
of the aircraft or along existing ice and freeze downstream
(runback ice).
– At cold temperatures a large part of a droplet freezes (rime ice),
– At higher temperatures only a small part freezes while the remaining part
freezes slowly (glaze ice).

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 Rime ice
• Rime ice is a dry, milky and opaque ice deposit which usually
occurs at low airspeed, low temperature and low liquid water
content.
• Characterized by instantaneous freezing of the incoming
supercooled water droplets upon impact, trapping the air inside.
Freezing fraction = 1.
• As a consequence, the shape of the surface is altered generating
performance penalties due to the loss in the aerodynamic
characteristics and to the added weight which introduces an
unbalance of the aircraft components during the flight.

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Rime ice

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 Glaze ice

• Glaze ice is a wet growth ice formed at a temperature around

0oC and a high liquid water content.
• It has a clear appearance and a density closer to that of the
cloud water.
• It occurs when a fraction of the water droplets freezes upon
impact while the remainder droplets run back along the surface
and freeze downstream. Freezing fraction < 1.
• This ice accretion process produces different ice shape deposit:
such as double horned, beak or a rounded glaze ice.
• Glaze ice accretion dangerously affects and alters the shape of
the original surface body producing aerodynamic penalties
much more severe than rime ice accretion can cause.

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Glaze ice

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 Icing variations
• Icing intensity may be severe in some regions and light in some
other regions depending on the structure, horizontal and vertical
extents, and the contents of the clouds.
• Icing conditions varies with altitude, season and geographical
regions.
• Icing is more serious in winter season at altitudes of 7000 to
9000 ft above ground level.
• At high altitudes, above 20 000 ft (6 km) icing is rare and have
light intensity.
• The minimum low temperature for icing is -40oC, for low
temperatures all water droplets transform to ice crystals.
• Icing may also vary with horizontal extent of clouds due to the
variation of liquid water content.

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Icing variations

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 Ice growth

• There are two mechanisms by which cloud droplets grow:

– coalescence process which occurs because of the different fall velocities
of the cloud droplets,
– growth of ice crystals (Bergeron process) due to the coexistence side by
side of both ice crystals and cloud droplets.

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Ice growth - coalescence

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Ice growth – Bergeron process

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 Ice growth – Bergeron process
• Bergeron process is a process of ice crystal growth that occurs in
mixed phase clouds (containing a mixture of supercooled water
and ice) in regions where the ambient vapor pressure is
between the (higher) saturation vapor pressure over water and
the (lower) saturation vapor pressure over ice.
• Vapor pressure or equilibrium vapor pressure is defined as
the pressure exerted by a vapor in thermodynamic equilibrium
with its condensed phases (solid or liquid) at a given temperature
in a closed system.
• This is a subsaturated environment for liquid water but a
supersaturated environment for ice resulting in rapid
evaporation of liquid water and rapid ice crystal growth through
vapor deposition.
• If the density of ice is small compared to liquid water, the ice
crystals can grow large enough to fall out of the cloud, melting
into rain drops if lower level temperatures are warm enough.

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Precipitation type and icing

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Precipitation type and icing

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 Physical factors affecting icing

• Meteorological and aerodynamical factors affecting aircraft icing:

– liquid water content,
– temperature,
– relative humidity,
– droplet diameter,
– rate of catch.

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Icing intensity

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Icing intensity

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Icing intensity

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Liquid water content - cumulus clouds

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Liquid water content - stratiform clouds

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Effect of liquid water content

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Effect of liquid water content

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Effect of temperature

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 Collection efficiency

• Is the ratio of the mass of droplets impinging on an obstacle,

such as wing or airfoil, in unit time to the mass of droplets which
would impinge if the droplets were following straight line
trajectories.

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Collection efficiency

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Collection efficiency
(effect of airspeed)

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 Airspeed

• When the airspeed is high water droplets do not have enough

time to deviate from the airfoil and follow ballistic trajectories,
thus more droplets impact on the airfoil.
• As a consequence, the impingement zone will be wider and the
icing is expected to occur in a wider region.
• In addition, the velocity has an effect on the type of icing due to
aerodynamic heating effect. For high velocity we usually have a
glaze ice with horns which may cause separation over the airfoil.

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 Collection efficiency
(effect of airframe size)

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 Collection efficiency
(effect of droplet size)

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 Airframe and droplet size

• A larger airframe will constitute a larger obstacle for the

incoming droplets causing them to deviate significantly away
from itself, thus trajectories will roughly follow the streamlines.
As a result fewer droplets impact the surface over a narrow
impingement zone.
• Increasing droplet size has the same effect as increasing the
airspeed as far as the droplet trajectories are concerned since
the kinetic energy of the droplets increase.

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 Ice accretion modeling

• The main objectives of ice accretion simulation:

– calculation of the impingement pattern of the particles on the wing which
determines the droplet impingement regions,
– mass of liquid (ice) on the body surface,
– the tangent or limit trajectories used to determine catch distributions or
the global and local collection efficiency.

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 Ice accretion modeling

• The main applications of ice accretion simulation:

– predict the shape and the rate of ice growth on the airframe,
– predict aerodynamic performance degradations,
– use in the design of anti/deicing systems.

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 Ice accretion modeling

• There are four main steps in an icing simulation,

– flow field calculation,
– determination of particle trajectories,
– thermodynamic analysis,
– ice accretion calculation.
• The computational procedure is an iterative process with a time-
stepping procedure where successive thin ice layers are formed
on the surface and followed by flow field and droplet
impingement recalculations.

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 Flow field calculation

• The flow field calculation is needed to determine the velocity of

air at any point in the flow field so that the droplet trajectory
calculations can proceed.
• Navier-Stokes (sophisticated and accurate) or
• Panel method (simpler and less accurate) can be used.
• Icing calculation accuracy does not improve significantly with
sophisticated methods.

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 Droplet trajectory calculation

• Droplets are released upstream of the wing and followed until

impact on the airfoil surface.
• The droplet equation of motion takes into account the drag,
buoyancy and gravitational forces.
• At each integration step, the local velocity needed to solve the
droplet equation of motion is obtained from the flow field
solution while the integration is continued following droplets
until they impinge on the wing surface or pass downstream of
the wing.
• Collection efficiency distribution is obtained.

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Droplet trajectory calculation
(single element airfoil)

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Droplet trajectory calculation
(airfoil with flap)

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Droplet trajectory calculation (wing)

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Collection efficiency distribution (wing)

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 Thermodynamic analysis
• The model is based on the first law of thermodynamics stating
that the mass and energy must be balanced in a control volume.
• The mass balance will take into account
– the mass flow rate of the impinging water,
– the mass flow rate of water flowing into the control volume (runback
water from previous CV),
– the mass flow rate of water flowing out of the control volume (runback
water to next CV),
– the mass flow rate due to evaporation or sublimation,
– the rate of freezing water mass.

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 Thermodynamic analysis
• The energy balance will take into account:
– the convective heat losses,
– the heat gain by friction,
– the enthalpy associated with impinging water,
– energy associated with runback water entering the control volume,
– the enthalpy associated with evaporation or water running back to
neighboring control volumes,
– the internal energy, calculated in relation to a given reference state
depending on the type of surface involved: dry, wet or ice.

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 Ice accretion calculation
• Messinger model (1953).
• 1-D phase change (Stefan) problem.
• Extended to handle 2-D and 3-D problems by Myers (2001),
Extended Messinger Model.
• Consists of one mass conservation, one phase change and two
energy equations (one for the water and one for the ice layer).

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Computed ice shape (wing)

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Ice thickness distribution (wing)

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