All projects
Turbofan blade icing
An industry icing campaign on jet-engine fan blades, with high-speed video of ice shedding.
- When
- 2021
- My role
- Undergraduate researcher
- Where
- AERTS icing facility, Penn State
- Sponsor
- Industry (GE)
A company-sponsored campaign to collect icing data on a representative jet-engine fan blade. The aim was to understand how ice forms, how it sheds and how much performance is lost under different icing conditions.
We tested two blade shapes in both rime ice (colder, around −16 °C) and glaze ice (warmer, around −6 °C).
What I did
- Captured ice-shedding events with high-speed video.
- Measured ice shapes and accreted ice density, and digitised photos of ice shapes to find impingement limits.
- Collected performance degradation data on two different blade shapes.
- Varied liquid water content, droplet size, RPM, nozzle location and temperature, and mapped the chamber's temperature profile.
- Used a new passive balancer system up to 1400 RPM.
Video
Photos
