Experimental study of plasma anti-icing over an airfoil based on two different electrode layouts

This paper presents experimental investigation on plasma anti-icing in icing wind tunnel based on two different electrode layouts. Under the same excitation parameters, the voltage and current waveform, surface temperature distribution and dynamic anti-icing process of the plasma actuator are collected and analyzed, from which the influence of electrode layout on anti-icing effect is studied. With the same excitation parameters, the layout of the actuators has little effect on the single pulse energy and average power of SDBD when the total length of the high voltage electrodes of the actuator is approximately the same. The temperature in the leading-edge area of the actuator is lower than that of the trailing edge area. At the leading edge of the airfoil, the temperature between two adjacent high-voltage electrodes presents a ‘V’ distribution. With the time evolution, under the continuous impact of supercooled water droplets, the aera of high temperature region on the surface of the actuator decreases gradually. Under the same excitation parameters, the streamwise actuators with an interval of 5mm have good anti-icing ability during 0-240s. When the peak-to-peak value of the applied voltage is set to 8kV and the pulse repetition frequency is set to 6kHz, the streamwise actuator with electrode spacing of 5mm has excellent anti-icing effect. However, the anti-icing effect of the streamwise/ spanwise combined actuator is not ideal. Continuously distributed ice layer is formed at the leading edge of the airfoil, indicating that the spanwise electrode at the leading edge can’t improve the anti-icing effect, but reduce the anti-icing ability of the actuator.

I. Introduction

When the aircraft passes through clouds containing supercooled water droplets, icing will occur on the windward side of the aircraft, which will seriously affect flight safety^[1]. Compared with electrothermal and gas thermal anti-icing and de-icing methods, plasma actuator has the advantages of rapid response and significant thermal effect, and has important application prospects in the field of aircraft anti-icing and deicing^{[2] –[4]}.