Investigation of fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics for a thermal anti-icing system of a high-altitude and long-endurance UAV

Abstract

ABSTRACT This research performs a three-dimensional simulation to investigate the fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics for hot-air jets impinging on the wing leading-edge surface. Both the periodic model and the whole model are proposed to examine the thermal anti-icing performance for hot air ejecting from a piccolo tube onto the impinging surface. The results show that, for the periodic model, the enhancement of the average Nusselt number can be up to 94.4%, and the enhancement of the average heat flux is up to 29.7% for 100 ≦ uj ≦ 350 m/s and 300 ≦ Tj ≦ 550 K when compared with the results of the basic case of uj = 200 m/s and Tj = 450 K. The maximum enhancement of the $\overline {Nu} $ is 62.3% as the spacing decreases from Sn = 8 to Sn = 4 and the optimum Numax and $\overline {Nu} $ occur at Si = 5 and Si = 6 for the single-array holes with 3 ≦ Si ≦ 7 and 4 ≦ Sn ≦ 8. In addition, the θh for maximum $\overline {{{Nu}}} $ is 10° and the maximum enhancement of the $\overline {{{Nu}}} $ is ∼15.7% for double-array holes and staggered-array holes as compared with single-array holes. In addition, the nonuniformity of Nusselt number and heat flux distributions are significantly improved. For the whole model, the maximum enhancement of the average Nusselt number is ∼7.5% and the optimum configuration is θh = 40°, for cases with La = 60, Dp = 8, $\dot{m}$ = 0.15 kg/s, Si = 6, 1 ≦ Nh ≦ 5, 10 ≦ Sn ≦ 30 and 10° ≦ θh ≦ 60°.