Nanosecond dielectric barrier discharge aircraft ice protection system

The Earth's atmosphere contains lots of water vapor at every level. Liquid water droplets in clouds can be below the freezing point, a matter phase state with the thermodynamic name of "supercooled". It so happens that all aircraft flying at subsonic speeds into clouds in these conditions collect ice on every forward exposed structure. The big engineering challenge is to design and develop ice protection systems that use the least amount of engine power, which at this point is why, numerically, the number of ice-protected aircraft is the minority compared to overall global number of aircraft. This paper presents results of numerical modeling of nanosecond surface dielectric barrier discharge (ns-SDBD) for aircraft ice protection system using a heat release in highly nonequilibrium pulsed plasma. The major attention is paid to the effects based on ultrafast (on nanosecond time scale at atmospheric pressure) local heating of the gas, since at present the main successes in ice protection using gas discharges are associated with namely this thermal effect. The mechanisms of ultrafast heating of air at high electric fields realized in these discharges, as well as during the decay of discharge plasma, are analyzed.