Investigation of Heterogeneous Ice Nucleation on the Micro-Cubic Structure Superhydrophobic Surface for Enhancing Icing-Delay Performance

The aim of this study is to explore the heterogeneous ice nucleation behavior based on controllable micro-cubic array structure surfaces from the statistic perspective.To this end,we firstly constructed a group of micro-cubic array structures on silicon substrates by a selective plasma etching technique.After grafting low-free-energy substance,the as-constructed micro-cubic array structure surfaces exhibited higher non-wettability with the water contact angle being up to 150°.On this basis,500 cycles of freezing and melting processes were accurately recorded to analyze the instantaneous ice nucleation behavior according to the statistical results of freezing temperature.As a consequence,the statistical freezing temperature of the sample with micro-spacing distance of 40μm is as low as−17.13°C.This microstructure configuration(conforming to Cassie-Baxter wetting regime)not only could entrap more air pockets,but also achieved lower solid-liquid contact area,resulting in lower ice nucleation rate(~2–3 orders of magnitude less than that on the flat substrate).Furthermore,the gradually increasing micro-spacing distance to 60μm would induce the transition from CassieBaxter to Wenzel wetting state,leading to higher freezing probability and ice nucleation rate.The complete understanding on microstructure configuration improving the ice nucleation will lay the foundation stone for the microstructure design of ice-repellent materials.

Experimental study of an anti-icing method over an airfoil based on pulsed dielectric barrier discharge plasma

Aircraft icing has long been a plague to aviation for its serious threat to flight safety. Even though lots of methods for anti-icing have been in use or studied for quite a long time, new methods are still in great demand for both civil and military aircraft. The current study in this paper uses widely used Dielectric Barrier Discharge（DBD） plasma actuation to anti-ice on a NACA0012 airfoil model with a chord length of 53.5 cm in a closed-circuit icing wind tunnel. An actuator was installed at the leading edge of the airfoil model, and actuated by a pulsed low-temperature plasma power source. The actuator has two types of layout, a striped electrode layout and a meshy electrode layout.The ice accretion process or anti-icing process was recorded by a CCD camera and an infrared camera. Instantaneous pictures and infrared contours show that both types of DBD plasma actuators have the ability for anti-ice under a freestream velocity of 90 m/s, a static temperature of -7℃,an Median Volume droplet Diameter（MVD） of 20 lm, and an Liquid Water Content（LWC） of 0.5 g/m^3. The detected variations of temperatures with time at specific locations reveal that the temperatures oscillate for some time after spraying at first, and then tend to be nearly constant values.This shows that the key point of the anti-icing mechanism with DBD plasma actuation is to achieve a thermal equilibrium on the model surface. Besides, the power consumption in the anti-icing process was estimated in this paper by Lissajous figures measured by an oscilloscope, and it is lower than those of existing anti-icing methods. The experimental results presented in this paper indicate that the DBD plasma anti-icing method is a promising technique in the future.