Parametric Investigation of High-voltage Plasma Discharge for Aircraft Icing Mitigation

Ice accretion on aircraft coming across supercooled water droplets in cloud greatly harms the flight performance and safety. The streamwise plasma heat knife is a newly developed icing mitigation method based on high-voltage plasma discharge. Aiming at optimizing the streamwise plasma heat knife method, the parametric investigation is carried out in this work. The influence of high voltage profile to the heating effects of the surface dielectric barrier discharge driven by nanosecond pulses (NS-SDBD) is investigated and the anti-icing performance of streamwise plasma heat knife at different configurations is compared. Columnar high-temperature regions produced by the filamentary discharge appears at short pulse rising time (t rise ), which gets disperse with the t rise increasing. An optimal t rise exists for a large range and value of temperature, which is 150 ns in the current research. Influence of pulse falling time (t fall ) is much smaller than that of t rise . The range and value of temperature gets small with t fall increasing. The pulse width improves the heating effect by increasing the discharge power. Strong heating effect exists at large pulse widths. When placing a spanwise electrode connecting the streamwise electrodes of the plasma actuator at the airfoil leading edge, the anti-icing performance gets worse, while good performance is achieved when the spanwise electrode is at the edge of the streamwise ones. Obvious ice ridges are formed downstream of the plasma discharge, which needs to be solved by further investigation and optimization.