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Researchers have recently focused on superhydrophobic coatings as an ice-mitigation tool. These surfaces have a high degree of water-repellency and were shown in previous low-speed droplet studies to reduce surface ice adhesion strength. However, there is little research regarding testing in aerospace icing conditions, i.e. high-speed super-cooled droplet impact (> 50 m/s) on a freezing substrate and air temperature. A detailed set of experiments were conducted in an icing wind tunnel to measure the ice adhesion strength of various superhydrophobic coatings by subjecting the surfaces to a super-cooled icing cloud consisting of 20 μm droplets and at a constant LWC of 0.4 g/m3. Test conditions include air speeds of 50 m/s and 70 m/s and in glaze (−5°C) and rime ice regimes (−15°C). The accreted ice was then removed by pressurized nitrogen in a mode 1 (tensile) adhesion test.

In recent years, there has been a growing desire to incorporate computational methods into aircraft icing certification practices. To improve understanding of ice shapes, a new experimental program in the NASA Icing Research Tunnel (IRT) will investigate swept hybrid models which are very large relative to the test section and are intended to operate at high lift coefficients. The present computations were conducted to help plan the experiments and to ascertain any effects of flow separation and unsteady forces. As they can be useful in robustly and accurately predicting large separation regions and capturing flow unsteadiness, a Detached Eddy Simulation (DES) approach has been adopted for simulating the flow over these large high-lift wing sections. The DES methodology was first validated using experimental data from an unswept NACA 0012 airfoil with leading-edge ice accretion, showing reasonable performance.