An advanced anti-icing/de-icing system utilizing highly aligned carbon nanotube webs

Abstract

A carbon nanotube (CNT) web is a horizontally oriented continuous film, obtained by drawing CNT forests produced by chemical vapour deposition (CVD). As the CNTs are highly conductive and predominantly aligned along the draw direction, by controlling the aspect ratio of these CNTs and the number of stacked web layers, a tailored resistance can be achieved. Layers of CNT web are compared to plies of carbon fiber (CF), as the heating elements within a glass fiber laminate assembly. Compared with the CF-heater as well as existing state-of-the-art heating systems, the highly aligned CNT-web-heater possesses negligible weight (e.g. compared with eight CF plies (3633.8 g m−2), an equivalent 20-CNT-web heater (0.38 g m−2) is ∼104 times lighter), rapid and uniform heating, efficient energy consumption and its electro-thermal behaviour can be tuned to suit any surface and power requirement to achieve rapid anti-icing/de-icing. Both anti-icing and de-icing performance have been verified and in particular, for de-icing, with a constant 4.9 kW m−2 power supply, the GF laminate with 40 layers of CNT web could remove accreted ice within 15 s.