Optimization of power distribution for electrothermal anti-icing systems by differential evolution algorithm

Abstract

Ice accretion on windward components of aircraft will seriously threaten flight safety. Electrothermal anti-icing systems can prevent icing on the critical components. They have great potential for lightweight and energy-saving aircraft. This paper develops a numerical anti-icing model coupled with heat conduction in a multi-layer composite structure to evaluate the anti-icing performance. Furthermore, a differential evolution algorithm is adopted to optimize the power distribution of an electrothermal anti-icing system with a fixed heating element layout to find the minimal power consumption to ensure that no runback water flows out of the protection area. The maximum anti-icing surface temperature, runback water range, and the maximum temperature in the multi-layer composite structure are selected as constraints during optimization to guarantee the effectiveness of the anti-icing protection system. The feasibility rule based on a constraint violation is deployed to handle the constraints. The distributions of internal temperature of the multi-layer structure, anti-icing surface temperature, and runback water are chosen to evaluate the performance of the electrothermal anti-icing system. Comparing these performance parameters of optimized and baselines cases shows that the differential evolution algorithm can obtain minimal power consumption based on the anti-icing model under fixed icing conditions and heating element layout. The analysis of different heat flux terms indicates that the heat power distribution of the electrothermal anti-icing system should match convection heat transfer coefficient distribution on the surface to increase the energy efficiency.