Current Research

Research project title:

Modelling of ice crystal icing in engines

Project description

In 2006 a new phenomenon was recorded to have caused repeated reports of engine failure. This was coined ice crystal icing and occurred at altitudes previously thought benign. Ice crystals would be ingested into airplane engines where they would partially melt, leading to the accretion and breaking off of ice, causing engine damage. I am currently exploring this accretion problem, with the aim to develop a full accretion model for an arbitrary engine geometry. This accretion problem lends itself to a few different long-term projects. The first is the development of the accretion models and a large-scale analysis of key physical quantities. The second involves studying the dynamics of ice break off in the engine.

Other research at Bath

Reading course on thin films

Investigation of viscous flows on curved surfaces. Formulation of thin film problems in a curvilinear coordinate system and examining the stability of such problems. Download Report

Thesis Formulation Report

A theoretical exploration of ice crystal icing. Historical and current literature is reviewed and further work is studied on a one-dimensional model of ice accretion corresponding to mixed/glaciated conditions for a hot substrate. A three layer thermodynamic accretion model is developed on the basis of a multiphase Stefan problem and then reduced to the original concept of design from the literature. Asymptotic solutions are found for the pseudo steady state and numerical results are obtained (via MATLAB) which show the transition from the single water layer to the proposed three layer model as key parameters are adjusted. Download TFR

Interdisciplinary Research Report

Optical fibres have been a source of study since the 1800's, but even more so in the current time period. With information and data being essential new resources, having the infrastructure to transfer this information on a microscopic and macroscopic scale has only become more important. This has led to an interest in multicore fibres (MCF). Used in medicine, for example in endoscopic imaging, these MCFs have 1000s (or even millions for endoscopy) of cores packed closely together. A larger number of cores has led to an increase in information per area but it also has drawbacks such as crosstalk between cores. As a signal travels down the fibre, power transfer occurs between cores leading to noisy data and a loss of information. Thus, it is no wonder that being able to extract a clean, uncorrupted image is hugely important in most applications. In this strand we seek to examine a MCF over a short length scale and examine how we can create tiling patterns that reduce this effect and how we can minimise the loss between cores over the minimum area. We use the insight gathered from strand one regarding coupling affects between identical and similar tiles based on distance. From this foundation we proceed in order to create an optimal tiling pattern which ideally results in minimal amount of loss of power in the cores. Download IRP report