Technical Paper
Ice Accretion Prediction on Helicopter Rotor Blade in Hover Flight
2007-09-24
2007-01-3309
In the present work, numerical results of ice accretion prediction on the UH-1H helicopter rotor blade with a NACA 0012 airfoil are reported. During the winter of 1982-83, the NASA Lewis Research Center and the US Army conducted a helicopter icing flight test (HIFT) program using a UH-1H aircraft at the Canadian National Research Council spray rig at Uplands Airport, Ottawa, Canada. From several hover icing flight conditions conducted in the HIFT program, a test case is selected to be evaluated with numerical analysis. The computation is performed at an airspeed of 4.6 m/s, ambient temperature of -19.0°C, liquid water content of 0.7 g/m3 and an exposure time of 3 minutes. In order to reproduce the experimental aerodynamic conditions the three-dimensional flow field is numerically computed. Both a two-dimensional and three-dimensional approach is followed to predict the ice shape.