Surface Coating Effect on Protection of Icing for Axial Fan Blade 2011-38-0009

It becomes more important to study ice accretion phenomena on rotating fan blades in small aircraft's jet engine. In the recent engine development, high flow and small diameter fan design is required to achieve light weight engine, so the fan blade inner diameter becomes smaller in order to increase engine mass flow. It leads to a decrease in blade to blade distance in hub region and accreted ice can easily block the air flow passage in this region. Also, anti-ice device which is for example, using hot air from bleed air, is not usually applied to recent commercial engine because it has adverse effect on the fuel consumption. Under such circumstances, anti-ice device for fan blades which has no adverse effect on fuel consumption is required.

In the present study, the purpose is to investigate surface coating effect on protection of icing to axial fan blade. At first, the ice adhesion shear stress to the surface was investigated experimentally for some of ice-phobic coatings. Then, the icing test of rotating fan in corporate with the ice-phobic coating blades was conducted using a simple model axial fan as an earlier step of experimental study using real fan blade of aircraft engine.

From these tests, anti/de-icing capability of some typical ice-phobic coating for axial fan blade was confirmed in the icing test using a simple model axial fan. Furthermore, it was confirmed by the icing test that the surface coating effect on protection of icing to axial fan blades was correlated to the ice adhesion shear stress of coating surface.