Peridynamic modeling and simulation of coupled thermomechanical removal of ice from frozen structures

Abstract

In this work, a bond-based peridynamic de-icing model has been developed to simulate the thermo-mechanical ice removal process of frozen structures. In the proposed numerical method, the influence of the deformation on the thermal states is considered. In this work, the ice is treated as an elastic brittle material in the framework of bond-based peridynamics, which can capture ice cracking during temperature increase and other temperature-dependent features of ice. Moreover, the characteristics of thermal load induced crack patterns in an ice sheet are discussed. The developed simulation method is verified and validated in a de-icing system of an aluminum sheet covered with ice, which is done by comparing the results obtained from peridynamic simulation with that obtained from finite element method (FEM) simulation. The results show good consistency between the peridynamic simulation and the FEM simulation. On the other hand, we find that the peridynamic simulations can directly capture the ice crack initiation and the crack propagation during the entire ice removal process, which is difficult to obtain from the FEM simulations.