Study of aircraft icing causes structural and systemic aerodynamic problems

Aircraft icing is one of the major weather hazards to aviation. The accretion of supercooled liquid onto an airplane during flight causes the hazardous situation. The icing reduces the aerodynamic quality of aircraft, increases the aircraft weight and drag while decreasing the ability of the airfoil to create lift. The actual weight of the ice on the airplane is insignificant when compared to the airflow disruption it causes. As power is added to compensate for the additional drag and the nose is lifted to maintain altitude, the angle of attack is increased, allowing the underside of the wings and fuselage to accumulate additional ice. Ice accumulates on every exposed frontal surface of the airplane, not just on the wings, propeller,and windshield, but also on the antennas, vents, intakes, and motor cowlings. In order to avoid and remove icing from aircraft aerodynamic surfaces, anti-icing and de-icing solutions are being implemented. In this thesis, thermal anti-icing system on B737-800 model aircraft wings was examined. For different flight altitudes and for an accepted wheather conditions, by using boundary layer equations, heat requiries against in-flight icing were calculated and in terms of providing the lack of heat, thermal wing anti-icing system capacity was obtained.