Just as for manned aircraft, ice accretion on the lifting surfaces of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a severe hazard that significantly limits their use. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods are a vital tool for understanding the effects of icing on UAVs. One of the most challenging tasks for the simulation is the generation of high-quality meshes of complex ice shapes.

Work being done at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology is extending what we know about aircraft icing to UAVs by performing a large suite of simulations. Meshing for these simulations is automated through the use of Glyph scripting and combines both structured and unstructured meshing techniques.

Read more of the case study How to Mesh a Frozen Drone at pointwise.com.