Ice crystal icing wind tunnel at USQ: initial characterisation

Ice crystal icing wind tunnel at USQ: initial characterisation

The Research Icing Wind Tunnel at the University of Southern Queensland (RIWT-USQ) has recently been established to enable cost-e ff ective experimentation for hardware and instrumentation development, and for fundamental studies of ice crystal icing at compressor- relevant flow conditions. The wind tunnel uses liquid nitrogen evaporation for water droplet freeze-out, followed by natural particle melting through dilution with warm air. The icing jet generator has a nozzle exit diameter of 170 mm and is positioned on the centre line of an open circuit wind tunnel which generates a co flowing stream at a similar flow speed. A probe traversing system was developed for the icing jet nozzle exit flow to enable quantification of the velocity and temperature uniformity at the exit of the icing jet generator. Within a core flow diameter of 140 mm, the flow speed was 28.1 ± 1.1 m / s. The jet exit temperature uniformity was also reasonable: over the same jet core flow region at one particular operating condition, the temperature was −9 . 1 ± 1.9◦C. Further developments are in-progress to increase the icing jet flow speed and improve the measurement of the icing jet temperature uniformity.