Evaluation of Inflight Deicing Performance for Designed Electrothermal Systems with Experimental Verification

Abstract

The deicing performance of an electrothermal system is critical to inflight safety; accordingly, a numerical study on dynamic deicing and the subsequent experimental verification are both performed. Different electrothermal systems are designed first; then, a coupling calculation method is developed by employing the equivalent heat transfer coefficient and the boundary condition iteration. The performance analysis is conducted by considering the variations of temperature and ice accretion, with their transient characteristics investigated. At the end of heating time, the minimum surface temperature ranges from 5.5 to 10°C, without the internal structure overheated. And, the maximum thickness of ice accretion is determined to be 1.39 mm, which is tolerable for the aerodynamic performance of the aircraft. Certain advantages of system B are found in the heating rate, whereas the cross-shaped parting strip installed on system A successfully prevents the leading edge from icing and divides the icing area. Furthermore, several effective deicing cycles of the two systems are observed during the wind-tunnel test, indicating the rationality of the preliminary design. The average and standard deviations of the experimental and numerical results are 13.2 and 0.79, respectively, which verify the accuracy of the dynamic simulation model.