A general approach based on mid-infrared (MIR) laser scanning is proposed to measure the 3-D ice shape no matter whether the ice is composed of clear ice, rime ice, mixed ice, or even supercooled water droplets or films. This is possible because MIR radiation penetrates ice and water only within a depth of less than 10 micrometers. First, an MIR laser point scanning technique is implemented and verified on transparent glass and clear ice. Then, to improve efficiency, an MIR laser line scanning method is developed and validated on different models. At last, several sequential MIR laser line scans are applied to trace the 3-D shape evolution of the continuous ice accretion on an airfoil in an icing wind tunnel. The ice growth process can be well observed in the results. The MIR scan shows a good agreement with the traditional visible laser scan on a plastic replication of the final ice shape made by the mold and casting method.
Based on unstructured hybrid grid and dynamic overlapping grid technique, numerical simulations of Unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equations were performed and investigation on isolated propeller aerodynamic characteristics and effects of propeller slipstream on turboprops were undertaken. The computational grid consisted of rotational subzone of propeller and stationary major-zone of aircraft, and walls criterion was used in the automatic hole-cutting procedure. Distance weight interpolation and tri-linear interpolation were developed to transfer information between the rotational and stationary subzones. The boundaries of overlapping grids were optimized for fixed axis rotation. The governing equations were solved by dual-time method and Lower Upper-Symmetric Gauss-Seidel method. The method and grid technique were verified by isolated propeller configuration and the computational results were in well agreement with the experimental data. The grid independence was studied to establish the numerical results. Finally, the flow around a turboprop case was simulated and the influence of propeller slipstream was presented by analyzing the surface pressure contours, profile pressure distribution, vorticity contours and profile streamline. It's indicated that the slipstream accelerates and rotates the free stream flow, changing the local angle of attack, enhancing the downwash effects, affecting the pressure distribution on wing and horizontal tail, as well as increasing the drag coefficient, pitching moment coefficient and the slope of lift coefficient.
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