Flight safety oriented ice shape modulation using distributed plasma actuator units

Ice accretion on the wings seriously threatens the flight safety of an aircraft. From the perspectives of ensuring flight safety and saving power consumption, the ice shape modulation method using distributed plasma is proposed. Distributed plasma actuator units are designed to modulate the spanwise continuous ice at the leading edge into periodically segmented ice pieces, forming a wavy leading edge. Both airfoil and scaled aircraft model, with continuous and modulated ice, are experimentally investigated and simulated. Compared with the continuous ice, ice shape modulation can significantly improve the aerodynamic performance, flight control characteristics and flight safety. This method can save about half electric power, which is very beneficial for application. (c) 2021 Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

This research proposes a method of using distributed plasma to modulate ice shape, significantly improving aerodynamic performance and flight safety while saving power consumption for aircraft. Experimental results show that ice shape modulation can create a wavy leading edge, providing better improvements in flight characteristics compared to continuous ice.