Abstract
Modelling a complex geometry, such as ice roughness, plays a key role for the computational flow analysis over rough surfaces. This paper presents two enhancement ideas in modelling roughness geometry for local flow analysis over an aerodynamic surface. The first enhancement is use of the leadingβedge region of an airfoil as a perturbation to the parabola surface. The reasons for using a parabola as the base geometry are: it resembles the airfoil leading edge in the vicinity of its apex and it allows the use of a lower apparent Reynolds number. The second enhancement makes use of the Fourier analysis for modelling complex ice roughness on the leading edge of airfoils. This method of modelling provides an analytical expression, which describes the roughness geometry and the corresponding derivatives. The factors affecting the performance of the Fourier analysis were also investigated. It was shown that the number of sineβcosine terms and the number of control points are of importance. Finally, these enhancements are incorporated into an automated grid generation method over the airfoil ice accretion surface. The validations for both enhancements demonstrate that they can improve the current capability of grid generation and computational flow field analysis around airfoils with ice roughness. Copyright Β© 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.