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Aircraft icing is the phenomenon that forms an ice layer on the solid surface by impingement of supercooled water droplets in the atmosphere. In icing on rotor blades, ice is shed from the blade surface by centrifugal force as the accumulated ice grows. The ice shedding on rotor blades is a dangerous phenomenon, but the physical mechanism and properties are unclear, and most simulations have not considered it. Therefore, it’s necessary to establish an ice shedding model for icing simulations. In this study, we proposed an ice shedding model in which the condition for ice shedding is that the centrifugal force exceeds both the adhesion and tensile forces. Centrifugal force exceeding adhesion force expresses adhesion failure, while centrifugal force exceeding tensile force expresses cohesion failure. We also proposed functions of temperature and medium volume diameter (MVD) as adhesion strength and tensile strength for ice shedding judgment.

It is well known that SLD (Supercooled Large Droplets) icing is very dangerous because it is more unpredictable than general icing caused by smaller droplets. In SLD conditions, a droplet deforms largely. Vargas et al. (2011) performed the experiments about the droplet deformation and they confirmed that the droplet deforms to an oblate spheroid, as the droplet approaches the leading edge of an airfoil. Therefore, the assumption that a droplet behaves as a sphere might be no longer valid. There are many models to predict the droplet deformation in which the deformation is described with the change of drag coefficient. For example, Hospers (2013) summarized the linear relations between the Reynolds number and the drag coefficient. Wiegand (1987) developed a model which uses a quasi-steady normal mode analysis of droplet deformation. However, the effect of the droplet deformation models on SLD icing simulations has not been completely clarified yet.

In a jet engine, ice accreted on a fan rotor can be shed from the blade surface due to centrifugal force, and the shed ice can damage compressor components. This phenomenon, which is referred to as ice shedding, threatens safe flight. However, there have been few studies on ice shedding because ice has numerous unknown physical parameters. Although existing icing models can simulate ice growth, these models do not have the capability to reproduce ice shedding. As such, in a previous study, we developed an icing model that takes into account both ice growth and ice shedding. In the present study, we apply the proposed icing model to a jet engine fan in order to investigate the effect of ice growth and shedding on the flow field. The computational targets of the present study are the engine fan and the fan exit guide vane (FEGV); thus, we simultaneously deal with the rotor-stator interaction problem.

Ice accretion is a phenomenon in which supercooled water droplets impinge and accrete on a body. In the present study, we focus on a jet engine because it is well known that ice accretion on blades and vanes leads to performance degradation and has caused severe accidents. Although various anti-icing and deicing systems have been developed, such accidents still occur. Therefore, it is important to clarify the phenomenon of ice accretion in a jet engine. However, flight tests for ice accretion are very expensive, and in the wind tunnel it is difficult to reproduce every climate condition where ice accretion occurs. Therefore, it is expected that computational fluid dynamics (CFD), which can estimate ice accretion in various climate conditions, will be a useful way to predict the ice accretion phenomenon. The characteristic phenomena of supercooled large droplets (SLD) are splash and bounce.

CFD is becoming an inevitable modern engineering tool in the vehicle aerodynamics. A LES based CFD approach is proposed for analysis for flows with complex geometrical configurations to which detailed experiments, high grid-density LES or DNS cannot be applicable. How CFD results should be evaluated for cases in which the related experiments are not available. The procedure proposed consists of four stages, i.e., inspections of solutions with coarse and fine meshes, reconfirmation of energy spectrum, references to the similar experiments, explanations of results obtained. The procedures are applied to the underbody flows with a semi-complex underbody configuration.

This paper describes the predicted results of acoustic transmission loss (T.L.) for a motorcycle muffler. First, the T.L. of a prototype muffler with one expansion chamber was obtained by measuring sound levels at the inlet and outlet ports of the muffler by speaker test. T.L. was then calculated by using a three-dimensional Finite-Element Method (FEM) for acoustic fields in the muffler. There was good coincidence between the calculated T.L. and experimentally observed data. Second, T.L. of the prototype muffler while attached to a motorcycle engine was measured. On this step, however, a similarly calculated T.L. using FEM to consider the effect of exhaust gas temperature in the muffler showed differences from the measured one. It was estimated that muffler body vibration sounds may affect the result. A dynamic analysis of the structure was carried out using FEM to obtain the eigen modes of the muffler body.

The quality of exhaust sound has become one of the important factors in the motorcycle market. Therefore both an efficient sound quality evaluation method and technology to achieve ideal sound quality have become necessary. Sound qualify evaluation has generally been performed by trial and error through repeated modification of exhaust silencer construction until desired quality was obtained. But it usually took painstaking work and long hours. In order to solve such problems, we established an objective auditory evaluation method. We also applied Principal component analysis to analize the result of the “Semantic Differential Method (SD method)” so as to determine the affecting elements. Through this analysis system, “powerful sound” caused by relatively higher content of the low frequency range and “crispy sound” caused by a cyclic sound pattern were determined to be desirable sounds for “American type” motorcycles.