Fundamental Study of Mixed-Phase Icing with Application to Ice Crystal Accretion in Aircraft Jet Engines

Author(s):  
Thomas Currie ◽  
Peter Struk ◽  
Jen-Ching Tsao ◽  
Dan Fuleki ◽  
Daniel Knezevici
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guillaume Mioche ◽  
Olivier Jourdan ◽  
Julien Delanoë ◽  
Christophe Gourbeyre ◽  
Guy Febvre ◽  
...  

Abstract. This study aims to characterize the microphysical and optical properties of ice crystals and supercooled liquid droplets within low-level Arctic mixed-phase clouds (MPC). We compiled and analyzed cloud in situ measurements from 4 airborne campaigns (18 flights, 71 vertical profiles in MPC) over the Greenland Sea and the Svalbard region. Cloud phase discrimination and representative vertical profiles of number, size, mass and shapes of ice crystals and liquid droplets are assessed. The results show that the liquid phase dominates the upper part of the MPC with high concentration of small droplets (120 cm−3, 15&tinsp;μm), and averaged LWC around 0.2 g m−3. The ice phase is found everywhere within the MPC layers, but dominates the properties in the lower part of the cloud and below where ice crystals precipitate down to the surface. The analysis of the ice crystal morphology highlights that irregulars and rimed are the main particle habit followed by stellars and plates. We hypothesize that riming and condensational growth processes (including the Wegener-Bergeron-Findeisein mechanism) are the main growth mechanisms involved in MPC. The differences observed in the vertical profiles of MPC properties from one campaign to another highlight that large values of LWC and high concentration of smaller droplets are possibly linked to polluted situations which lead to very low values of ice crystal size and IWC. On the contrary, clean situations with low temperatures exhibit larger values of ice crystal size and IWC. Several parameterizations relevant for remote sensing or modeling are also determined, such as IWC (and LWC) – extinction relationship, ice and liquid integrated water paths, ice concentration and liquid water fraction according to temperature. Finally, 4 flights collocated with active remote sensing observations from CALIPSO and CloudSat satellites are specifically analyzed to evaluate the cloud detection and cloud thermodynamical phase DARDAR retrievals. This comparison is valuable to assess the sub-pixel variability of the satellite measurements as well as their shortcomings/performance near the ground.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (13) ◽  
pp. 2094
Author(s):  
Chong Cheng ◽  
Fan Yi

Falling mixed-phase virga from a thin supercooled liquid layer cloud base were observed on 20 occasions at altitudes of 2.3–9.4 km with ground-based lidars at Wuhan (30.5 °N, 114.4 °E), China. Polarization lidar profile (3.75-m) analysis reveals some ubiquitous features of both falling mixed-phase virga and their liquid parent cloud layers. Each liquid parent cloud had a well-defined base height where the backscatter ratio R was ~7.0 and the R profile had a clear inflection point. At an altitude of ~34 m above the base height, the depolarization ratio reached its minimum value (~0.04), indicating a liquid-only level therein. The thin parent cloud layers tended to form on the top of a broad preexisting aerosol/liquid water layer. The falling virga below the base height showed firstly a significant depolarization ratio increase, suggesting that most supercooled liquid drops in the virga were rapidly frozen into ice crystals (via contact freezing). After reaching a local maximum value of the depolarization ratio, both the values of the backscatter ratio and depolarization ratio for the virga exhibited an overall decrease with decreasing height, indicating sublimated ice crystals. The diameters of the ice crystals in the virga were estimated based on an ice particle sublimation model along with the lidar and radiosonde observations. It was found that the ice crystal particles in these virga cases tended to have smaller mean diameters and narrower size distributions with increasing altitude. The mean diameter value is 350 ± 111 µm at altitudes of 4–8.5 km.


2017 ◽  
Vol 74 (11) ◽  
pp. 3799-3814 ◽  
Author(s):  
Songmiao Fan ◽  
Daniel A. Knopf ◽  
Andrew J. Heymsfield ◽  
Leo J. Donner

Abstract In this study, two parameterizations of ice nucleation rate on dust particles are used in a parcel model to simulate aircraft measurements of ice crystal number concentration Ni in the Arctic. The parcel model has detailed microphysics for droplet and ice nucleation, growth, and evaporation with prescribed vertical air velocities. Three dynamic regimes are considered, including large-scale ascent, cloud-top generating cells, and their combination. With observed meteorological conditions and aerosol concentrations, the parcel model predicts the number concentrations of size-resolved ice crystals, which may be compared to aircraft measurements. Model results show rapid changes with height/time in relative humidity, Ni, and thermodynamic phase partitioning, which is not resolved in current climate and weather forecasting models. Parameterizations for ice number and nucleation rate in mixed-phase stratus clouds are thus developed based on the parcel model results to represent the time-integrated effect of some microphysical processes in large-scale models.


Author(s):  
Jeanne G. Mason ◽  
Philip Chow ◽  
Dan M. Fuleki

The aviation industry has now connected a number of engine power-loss events to the ingestion of atmospheric ice crystals. Ice crystals are believed to penetrate to and eventually accrete on surfaces in the engine core where local air temperatures are warmer than freezing. Research aimed at understanding the accretion and shedding of ice crystals within the engine is being conducted industry-wide. Although this specific icing condition is readily produced inside an operating engine, rig testing is the preferred research tool because it has the advantage of good visibility of the ice accretion process and easy access for video documentation. This paper presents one of the first efforts to simulate the warm air/cold ice conditions occurring inside the engine core using a test rig. The test section contains geometry simulating the transition duct between the low and high compressors in a typical jet engine and an airfoil simulating the engine strut connecting the inner and outer surfaces. Test results showed ice formed on the airfoil and other surfaces in the test section at air temperatures warmer than freezing. However, when both the air and surface temperatures were held below freezing, the injected ice did not melt and no ice accretion was observed. Ice only formed on the airfoil when mixed phase conditions (liquid and ice) were produced, by introducing the ice into a warm airflow. This test concludes that a rig-level ice crystal icing test is feasible and capable of producing ice accretion in a simulated engine environment. As it was the first test of its kind, reporting of these preliminary test results are expected to benefit future experimenters.


2020 ◽  
Vol 77 (6) ◽  
pp. 2279-2296
Author(s):  
Fabian Hoffmann

Abstract The growth of ice crystals at the expense of water droplets, the Wegener–Bergeron–Findeisen (WBF) process, is of major importance for the production of precipitation in mixed-phase clouds. The effects of entrainment and mixing on WBF, however, are not well understood, and small-scale inhomogeneities in the thermodynamic and hydrometeor fields are typically neglected in current models. By applying the linear eddy model, a millimeter-resolution representation of turbulent deformation and molecular diffusion, we investigate these small-scale effects on WBF. While we show that entrainment is accelerating WBF by contributing to the evaporation of liquid droplets, entrainment may also cause aforementioned inhomogeneities, particularly regions filled with exclusively ice or liquid hydrometeors, which tend to decelerate WBF if the ice crystal concentration exceeds 100 L−1. At lower ice crystal concentrations, even weak turbulence can homogenize hydrometeor and thermodynamic fields sufficiently fast so as to not affect WBF. Independent of the ice crystal concentration, it is shown that a fully resolved entrainment and mixing process may delay the nucleation of entrained aerosols to ice crystals, thereby delaying the uptake of water vapor by the ice phase, further slowing down WBF. All in all, this study indicates that, under specific conditions, small-scale inhomogeneities associated with entrainment and mixing counteract the accelerated WBF in entraining clouds. However, further research is required to assess the importance of the newly discovered processes more broadly in fully coupled, evolving mixed-phase cloud systems.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xi Zhao ◽  
Xiaohong Liu ◽  
Vaughan T. J. Phillips ◽  
Sachin Patade

Abstract. For decades, measured ice crystal number concentrations have been found to be orders of magnitude higher than measured ice nucleating particles in moderately cold clouds. This observed discrepancy reveals the existence of secondary ice production (SIP) in addition to the primary ice nucleation. However, the importance of SIP relative to primary ice nucleation remains highly unclear. Furthermore, most weather and climate models do not represent well the SIP processes, leading to large biases in simulated cloud properties. This study demonstrates a first attempt to represent different SIP mechanisms (frozen raindrop shattering, ice-ice collisional break-up, and rime splintering) in a global climate model (GCM). The model is run in the single column mode to facilitate comparisons with the Department of Energy (DOE)'s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Mixed-Phase Arctic Cloud Experiment (M-PACE) observations. We show the SIP importance in the four types of clouds during M-PACE (i.e., multilayer, and single-layer stratus, transition, and front clouds), with the maximum enhancement in ice crystal number concentration by up to 4 orders of magnitude in the moderately-cold clouds. We reveal that SIP is the dominant source of ice crystals near the cloud base for the long-lived Arctic single-layer mixed-phase clouds. The model with SIP improves the occurrence and phase partitioning of the mixed-phase clouds, reverses the vertical distribution pattern of ice number concentration, and provides a better agreement with observations. The findings of this study highlight the importance of considering the SIP in GCMs.


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