An atmospheric ice empirical failure criterion

Characterizing the compressive strength of atmospheric ice is very significant to understand the ice shedding phenomenon. For this purpose, several tests were carried out in order to study the behavior of atmospheric ice under compression and tension, and under different experimental conditions. Ice was accumulated in a closed loop wind tunnel in order to simulate the natural processes of atmospheric icing. Four temperatures were considered (− 20, − 15, − 10 and − 5 °C), the wind speed inside the tunnel was set to 20 m/s in order to obtain a mean volume droplet diameter of 40 μm, and a water liquid content of 2.5 g/m3. An empirical failure criterion for the atmospheric ice was proposed based on the experimental observations, taking into account the porosity, strain rate and temperature.