Numerical Simulation and Optimization of Coupled Hot-Air Anti-Icing Characteristics for a Nacelle Lip

This study investigates nacelle lip icing on a particular engine model, focusing on anti-icing solutions with hot air as the heating medium. By integrating numerical simulations with Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) and Kriging optimization methods, the most severe icing condition within the flight envelope was identified and determined. Additionally, using coupled computational methods, the protective effectiveness of the proposed anti-icing structure was evaluated under these extreme conditions. Within the flight and icing envelopes, 30 distinct operating conditions were obtained using the LHS approach, and numerical simulations were conducted to model the icing conditions for each case. The calculated ice accretion served as the optimization criterion, and the Kriging optimization method was used to pinpoint the most severe icing condition within the flight envelope. The computational results indicate that under this severe condition, the ice thickness on the lip surface reaches 5.4 mm and 15.2 mm after 600 s and 1800 s, respectively, with a total ice accretion rate of 7.8 g/s, posing a significant threat to engine safety. The designed anti-icing structure can effectively provide thermal protection against this severe condition when the supply air temperature is set at 383.15 K, and the total air supply flow rate at the lip is 0.193 kg/s. Notably, the interior surface of the nacelle lip exhibits a 36.2% higher minimum convective heat transfer coefficient than the exterior surface, effectively preventing engine ice ingestion.