An experimental study on different plasma actuator layouts for aircraft icing mitigation

Abstract

An experimental study was conducted to examine the effects of dielectric-barrier-discharge plasma (DBD) actuator layout on the plasma-induced thermal characteristics and evaluate their effectiveness for aircraft icing mitigation. The experimental investigation was performed in the Icing Research Tunnel of Iowa State University (i.e., ISU-IRT) with an airfoil/wing model embedded with an array of DBD plasma actuators around the airfoil leading edge. The plasma actuators were arranged in different layouts (e.g., orientation, number, and width of exposed electrodes) to evaluate their effects on the anti-icing performance under a typical glaze icing condition pertinent to aircraft inflight icing phenomena. While the dynamics ice accretion or anti-icing process over the airfoil surface before and after turning on the plasma actuators was recorded by using a high-resolution imaging system, a high-speed infrared thermal imaging system was used to quantitatively map the temperature distributions over the airfoil surface. The experimental results clearly reveal that, with the same power consumption level, the plasma actuators in streamwise layout would result in higher plasma-induced surface heating and faster runback of the unfrozen water over the airfoil surface, thereby, having a noticeably better anti-icing performance, in comparison to those in spanwise layout. The plasma actuators in streamwise layout were found to not only be able to prevent ice accretion near the airfoil leading edge, but also allow the plasma-induced surface heating to convect further downstream to delay/prevent the runback ice formation near the airfoil trailing edge. A proper combination of the plasma actuation strength and the plasma discharge coverage over the airfoil surface was found to result in the optimum performance for aircraft anti-icing applications.