An Experimental Study to Characterize the Dynamic Interactions of DBD Plasma Discharges with Water and Ice Pertinent to Aircraft Inflight Icing Mitigation

An experimental study was performed to characterize the Dielectric-Barrier-Discharge (DBD) plasma discharges interacting with a complex multiphase system (i.e., air, water and ice) associated with ice accretion process over airframe surfaces in the context of aircraft inflight icing mitigation. The experimental study was carried out in the Icing Research Tunnel available at Iowa State University (i.e., ISU-IRT) to generate typical aircraft icing conditions with adequate liquid water content (LWC) levels in the frozen cold incoming airflows.  An array of DBD actuators were embedded over the surface of an airfoil/wing model were supplied with high voltages in either alternating current for AC-DBD plasma actuation or nanosecond pulses for ns-DBD plasma actuation. During the experiments, in addition to using a high-resolution imaging system to record the dynamic anti-/de-icing operation over the airfoil/wing surface upon switching on the DBD plasma actuators, a high-speed Infrared (IR) thermal imaging system is also utilized to quantitatively map the temperature distributions over the surface of the airfoil/wing to characterize the effects of DBD plasma actuations on the coupled heat and mass transfer of the ice accretion process. The findings derived from the present study are very helpful to explore/optimize design paradigms for the development of novel plasma-based anti-/de-icing strategies tailored specifically for aircraft inflight icing mitigation to ensure safer and more efficient aircraft operation in atmospheric icing conditions.