A Three-Dimensional Water Droplet Trajectory and Impingement Analysis Program

Abstract

The paper presents the details of the development of a three-dimensional panel method based droplet impingement analysis code. The code is based on the low-order three-dimensional panel method code CMARC which is the commercially available ANSI C language version of PMARC (Panel Method Ames Research Center) code. With modern PCs, low-order panel methods can provide nearly the same level of accuracy as higher-order methods as long as sufficient panels are added in areas of high curvature with significant savings in computational time. The paper gives details of the three-dimensional droplet trajectory calculation and impingement analysis. The paper compares the impingement characteristics with those obtained from the two-dimensional code CANICE. The effect of important flow and icing variables on impingement characteristics is presented to highlight some of the effects of finite aspect ratio on droplet impingement characteristics. A comparison of droplet impingement efficiency with the two-dimensional version of CANICE shows that the threedimensional effects result in an increase in impingement limits as well as the maximum impingement efficiency value.