Performance and Energy Efficient Operation of Electro-Thermal Ice Mitigation System using Infrared Thermography

• Design of an electrothermal ice mitigation system for testing deicing and anti-icing • Correlation of numerical heat transfer and experimental analysis using infrared thermography • Continuous vs pulsed heating modes • Optimizing heating interval for cyclic anti-icing and pulsed de-icing heating strategies Electrothermal heating systems are used worldwide for their robust and effective heating functionality during the icing events. While the formation of icing itself is a combination of localized and ambient temperatures, LWC, droplet diameter, and to counter it, anti-icing is often used; this work compares the performance of traditional, fully throttled, power hungry continuous heating approach versus pulsed heating technique. That further poses a challenge of choosing an optimum heating interval between pulses. The work is expanded to cover deicing aspect as well. For this purpose, a comparative heat transfer analysis using multiple thermal infrared cameras is presented and numerical heat transfer model is discussed as an approx. digital twin. A dedicated experimental setup is prepared to carry out experiments in a controlled environment. Three case studies are presented: (i) assessing impact of infrared camera resolution to examine heat change (∆T curves); (ii) characterizing continuous/pulsed heating with varying pulse width, and (iii) finding an optimized heating interval to carry out cyclic anti-icing.