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A fully CFD-based methodology for ice particle tracking based on a Monte Carlo statistical approach and a six-degrees-of-freedom particle-tracking module has been developed within the FENSAP-ICE in-flight icing system. A one-way aerodynamic coupling between the airflow and the ice particle has been adopted, such that the flowfield determines the forces and moments on the particle at each location on its track, but the particle, being much smaller, has no aerodynamic effect on the aircraft's flowfield. A complete envelope of force and moment coefficients has been computed for a representative ice shape, in order to generate a permanent database. At each time step during the integration of the particle track, the angles of the local flow velocity vector with the principal axes of the particle are determined and used to interpolate the corresponding force and moment coefficients from the particle's database. These 6-DOFs are then used to compute the next particle location.

A numerical approach to the trajectory simulation of break-up ice in the in-flight icing code FENSAP-ICE is investigated. At each time step, the displacement and rotation of the moving domains is computed from a 6-DOFs analysis of the forces and moments. The moving domains are amalgamated into the fixed background mesh by a hole-cutting and stitching algorithm, producing a continuous unstructured hybrid mesh, eliminating interpolation between domains and ensuring that the fluxes are fully conserved across the entire mesh. To maintain good load balancing on parallel computers, the finite element CFD flow solver uses an efficient parallel iterative matrix solver and domain decomposition to partition the computational domain into equal-sized subdomains. Test cases used to validate and demonstrate the features of the computational algorithm are shown.