Ice Adhesion on Various Surfaces and Flow Conditions

Atmospheric icing presents a threat to many human-made devices with examples including icing of electrical power networks, wind turbines, communication towers, and aircraft. Predominantly in the case of aircraft engine, ice accretion and ingestion of shed ice (after accretion) can be detrimental to the engine performance. As such, many studies have been conducted, seeking new and innovative solutions to the icing problems. Among these studies, ice adhesion is particularly investigated, as surfaces with low ice adhesion property are very much sought. Additionally, ice shedding very much depends on adhesion. However, the majority of the work done has mainly focused on static ice, contrarily to high-speed impact ice as it would occur in the situation of engine components in-flight conditions. A detailed review of engine icing including icing due to both supercooled droplets and ice crystals is first conducted, as this does not yet exist in the available literature. This review motivates specific experimental investigations for the rest of the Ph.D. dissertation. In particular, ice adhesion would be measured in both tensile and shear mode for both static and impact ice in the same facility, making this work unique among many previously published reports.
The present work will investigate ice adhesion for a variety of flow conditions and surfaces. The tested surfaces will range from metal alloys to icephobic coatings. The facility to be designed, developed, and employed would be a novel compact icing research tunnel (CIRT), allowing the installation of detailed surface and diagnostic devices to measure ice adhesion stress and thermal conditions. Finally, a comparison between this new set of data to existing ice adhesion data available in the literature would be provided, as well as predominant trends in ice adhesion strength model on various surfaces.